This is a shorter version of the article titled “Czechia: When Communism became illegal again” originally published on LINKS https://links.org.au/czechia-when-communism-became-illegal-again
It is official now: as of 1 January, being a Communist in Czechia can make you a criminal, carrying a prison sentence of up to five years.
With a recent amendment to the Criminal Code, the state has written the “equalization” of Communism and Nazism into language that actually matters: punishment. The provision lumps together “Nazi, Communist or other” movements and threatens one to five years in prison for founding, supporting, or “propagating” a movement deemed to suppress rights or incite hatred, explicitly including “class hatred.” The sales pitch is familiar and tidy: two “totalitarianisms,” two symmetrical evils, therefore two symmetrical bans. But the symmetry is politics, not analysis, and once it is encoded as criminal law it stops being a debate about history and becomes a tool for governing the present.
The Czech case is also unusually clean in its logic: it does not simply condemn concrete crimes committed by concrete regimes. It targets the communicability of an idea. What counts as “promotion”? What counts as “a Communist movement”? Does a lecture, a book club, a slogan, a symbol, a song, or a historical argument become “propaganda” the moment an ambitious prosecutor decides it should? This is the point where the legal form does its real work: vagueness produces caution. A law like this does not need mass convictions to succeed. It only needs to create uncertainty, a chilling effect, and a credible threat that “Communism” is a suspect category of speech and association.
Czechia is not some exotic outlier. Across different jurisdictions, the concept of “extremism” has increasingly functioned as a legal solvent that dissolves the distinction between violent practice and theoretical critique. In Germany, the Hamburg Administrative Court ruled in April 2025 that the Marxistische Abendschule (Marxist Evening School) in Hamburg should not have been branded “left-wing extremist” in an intelligence report. But the controversy around the case exposed something deeper than one bad listing: a model of conditional tolerance, where Karl Marx may be read as long as the state is satisfied it remains harmless.
In Russia, the logic is less polite and more coercive: “extremism” and “terrorism” laws are used to police dissent and even political education, and the Ufa Marxist circle case shows the mechanism in miniature, with court-appointed experts interpreting Marxist and Leninist texts as indicators of violent intent rather than ideas to be debated.
Like 85 years ago, under the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Communism is illegal in Czechia. While East European liberal democracies claim to stand opposed to Nazism, they obviously unite with it in one respect: hatred of Communism. More awkwardly still, they unite in this respect with the very Russian authoritarian state they rhetorically denounce. Different flags, same reflex: criminalize the Communist idea.
The arc: From banning Nazism, to banning Communism, to declaring them equivalent
For most of the 20th century, Europe’s “banned ideology” had a clear name: Nazism. In the socialist bloc, this ban rested less on liberal scruple than on post-war legitimacy and state doctrine. After 1989 the target shifted. Communism was gradually added to the repertoire of prohibited symbols and suspect organisations, first through memory laws and display bans, then via the elastic language of “extremism” and “anti-constitutional activity.”
The newest and most consequential step is the formal equivalence now being built into legal and quasi-legal frameworks: Nazism and Communism are treated as equally destructive, equally extremist, and therefore equally eligible for prohibition. This is not primarily an “old Europe” phenomenon, where Communist parties and Marxist traditions have generally remained within lawful politics. It is driven disproportionately by former socialist states, where anti-Communism has served state-building and political boundary-making, and where the temptation to replace argument with exclusion has been strongest.
The Baltic states provided an early template by constructing legal symmetry between Nazi and Soviet symbolism. Lithuania’s 2008 ban on the public display of Nazi and Soviet symbols and Latvia’s 2013 restrictions on their use at public events did not yet amount to Czech-style criminalisation of “Communist propaganda,” but they entrenched a juridical habit: pairing the two histories as a single moral and political problem.
At the EU level, this agenda has been echoed through the language of “totalitarianism.” European Parliament resolutions in 2009 and 2019 promoted a shared remembrance framework in which Nazi and Communist regimes appear as comparable threats to Europe’s moral order, creating a soft-law narrative that makes national hard-law moves easier to legitimise.
Ukraine is the hinge case because anti-Communist law there is not only retrospective condemnation but a nation-building project in a high-conflict environment, where memory, security, and identity are legally fused. The 2015 “decommunisation” law condemned Communist and Nazi regimes and prohibited propaganda and symbols; the Communist Party of Ukraine was then banned by court decision in December 2015. The legal logic is blunt: Communism is treated not as a political tradition but as a delegitimised category to be removed from public space and, in practice, from lawful politics. This is also where the ethnonational dimension becomes concrete: decommunisation helps define who counts as the legitimate political nation and which narratives are admissible, precisely when “security” makes exceptional measures feel ordinary.
If this were simply “post-socialist democracies versus authoritarian Russia,” the story would be easier. It is not. Russia’s security-state rule has its own anti-Communist reflex, often wrapped in imperial nostalgia, and Putin’s attacks extend beyond Lenin to the Marxist canon. In his Valdai remarks on 21 October 2021, he described the Bolsheviks as “relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels” to remake society and morality, framing Marxism less as an intellectual tradition than a blueprint for coercion. The Ufa Marxist circle case shows how rhetoric can become procedure: “expert” interpretation turns reading and discussion into insinuations of criminal intent, treating Marxist texts, such as Lenin’s State and Revolution, as suspect material that “explains” the accused rather than arguments to be debated.
The convergence is politically awkward but analytically important: on the question of Communism, East European liberal democracies that present themselves as the opposite of authoritarianism often end up meeting Russia on shared terrain. Communism becomes something to be policed rather than argued with.
How did they get there? Legitimacy, memory and the return of anti-Communism
The contemporary turn toward criminalising Communism in parts of Eastern Europe makes little sense unless we start from the post-war legitimacy of the socialist regimes. Communist parties did not rule only as architects of a new social order; they ruled as forces with an anti-fascist pedigree. They fought Nazism, suffered repression under occupation, and often led resistance movements that could plausibly claim to represent “the people” against foreign rule and domestic collaboration. This legitimacy was not ornamental. It was foundational. In Yugoslavia, for example, “Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People” remained part of official political language until the state’s disintegration in 1991.
Anti-fascism also functioned as a political absolution mechanism across countries that had allied with or accommodated the Axis. The post-1944 “anti-fascist turn” helped reconstruct statehood under the banner of nominal independence and reduced the need for prolonged occupation. But it came with a long-term cost: because legitimacy was rebuilt through Communist anti-fascism, de-Nazification was often shallow, selective, or politically managed. Collaborationist structures were absorbed, neutralised, or selectively punished rather than dismantled, leaving unresolved questions of responsibility politically frozen rather than settled.
After 1989 this legitimacy equation collapsed. As Nazism receded from usable political memory and nationalist narratives gained strength, anti-fascism stopped working as a legitimising resource. New regimes reconstructed legitimacy through pre-socialist national narratives, sometimes reaching back to interwar or even pre-modern statehood traditions. EU accession later supplied an external legitimation device: “Europe” became a certification of democratic credentials that could wash historical ambiguities in the language of “values.” In some cases, this turn slid into mythic depth of time. When legitimacy is anchored in ethnonational continuity rather than modern social struggle, anti-fascism becomes dispensable and historical responsibility negotiable, while Communism reappears as the principal threat, not only for what it did, but for what it still represents: a materialist, systemic challenge to the social order.
The intensity of this shift has been uneven. The legal hardening of anti-Communism has been led above all by post-socialist EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe, especially the Baltic states and Czechia, and by Ukraine, where nation-building, geopolitics, and securitised memory politics make “decommunisation” a state project. “Old Europe” has generally been more tolerant in practice, less because Western capitalism is friendlier to Communism than because Communist parties and Marxist traditions were never fully expelled from legitimate politics and remained embedded in parliamentary life, unions, and intellectual culture. The Western Balkans sit in a different register again: history wars and rehabilitation politics are intense, but explicit bans on Communist ideology have been less central to regime legitimation, partly because partisan anti-fascism persisted longer as a reference point. In much of post-Soviet Central Asia, where control is exercised through party registration and policing rather than memory law, there is little need for the European theatre of equivalence.
In that setting, the ideological enemy was reassigned. Fascism was a defeated external past; Communism was the only coherent alternative embedded in lived historical experience, and the only tradition that remained “dangerous” in a systemic sense. Yet outright bans on Communism posed a problem: they clash with constitutional guarantees, international norms, and liberal-democratic self-presentation. Direct repression looks awkward and legally vulnerable.
The solution was equivalence. By placing Communism and Nazism in the same moral-legal category of “totalitarianism” or “extremism,” states could present repression as neutrality. Communism was not prohibited as Communism, but as one half of a symmetrical equation. This provided legal cover and rewrote the post-war story: anti-fascism, once the core resource of socialist legitimacy, was hollowed out and redeployed against Communism itself. History was not denied. It was rearranged.
That is how they got there: not through a sudden authoritarian leap, but through a slow transformation of legitimacy, from anti-fascism, to nationalism, to Europeanisation, and finally to a juridical framework in which Communism can be neutralised without naming capitalism as the beneficiary.
Why it matters
The accelerating criminalisation of Communist symbols, language and tradition matters for two reasons.
First, it rewrites the political-historical grammar of 20th-century Europe. Once Communism is legally recoded as morally equivalent to Nazism, the anti-fascist story that shaped post-war legitimacy is quietly hollowed out. You do not need to praise Nazism to get the effect. You just need a moral rearrangement in which anti-fascism becomes a disputable partisan narrative, while those who fought Communists can be cast, by implication, as occupying the “right side” of history. As Slavoj Žižek warned, attempts to “compare rationally the two totalitarianisms” often slide, explicitly or implicitly, toward the conclusion that fascism was the lesser evil, even an “understandable reaction” to the Communist threat.
This is not only theoretical. Across parts of Eastern Europe, “balance” narratives have repeatedly been used to sanitise collaborationist pasts: the pairing of Nazi and Soviet histories as one moral object makes it easier to relativise local participation in Nazi crimes and to reframe Soviet-linked resistance as a form of treason rather than liberation. Latvia and Estonia’s recurring controversies around commemorations involving Waffen-SS formations show how quickly “they fought the Soviets” becomes a moral alibi once anti-Communism is treated as an overriding virtue. None of this implies these states are “Nazi.” It implies something more banal and more dangerous: when Communism becomes the arch-crime, ultranationalism and collaboration can be reframed as unfortunate but understandable “defence,” and the moral hierarchy of the century becomes negotiable.
Ukraine shows the dynamic in its sharpest form because the law is not only about the past but about the present: it fuses memory, security and nation-building. The 2015 decommunisation package condemned Communist and Nazi regimes and restricted propaganda and symbols, while adjacent legislation legally honoured “fighters for Ukraine’s independence,” pulling wartime nationalist formations into a state-sponsored narrative of legitimacy. The Venice Commission has warned that this style of “militant democracy” drafting risks vagueness, breadth, and chilling effects, because it can impose a positive interpretation of contested history under implied sanction. In practice, once the state defines Communism as a security threat, it becomes easier to legislate national innocence and to discipline historical debate by law.
The second reason is more important, and it is the core of the trend: anti-Communist legalism is not mainly about protecting democracy from dictatorship. It is about protecting capitalism from an alternative. Communism is the only modern political tradition that explicitly targets the foundation of capitalist power: private ownership of the means of production and the social order built around it. That is why the “equalisation” framework is so useful. Outright bans look awkward in societies that still market themselves as pluralist. Moral symmetry solves the problem: declare Nazism and Communism equally extremist and then treat the suppression of Communist speech as democratic hygiene.
What makes the Czech amendment especially revealing is that it does not stop at moral symmetry. It extends the “hate” logic into the domain where Communist politics actually lives: class antagonism. Alongside racial, ethnic, national and religious hatred, the prohibited movements are said to include those advocating “class hatred.” That is not a technical detail. It is the pivot. Communist politics is organised around opposition to a social order grounded in private property and exploitation. By inserting “class” into the same criminal register as race and nation, the law offers a ready-made translation of labour conflict into criminal intent: collective struggle against capitalist rule can be re-described as “hatred” against a social group.
This narrows the future in a concrete way. It gives prosecutors a vocabulary for treating class struggle itself as extremist, with outcomes determined by ambiguity, deterrence, and selective enforcement. The inversion is structural: workers mobilising against exploitation become the obvious targets of the “hatred” frame, while the everyday coercion of property and institutions is treated as normal order.
That is also where “liberal democracy” begins to rhyme with Russia’s security state in an analytically uncomfortable way. Putin treats challenges to authority as illegitimate by definition; East European liberal regimes increasingly treat challenges to capitalist property relations as illegitimate by rebranding them as “extremism,” “hate,” or “propaganda.” The point is not to refute Communism, but to make it legally and morally unsayable, to turn a systemic alternative into a taboo and, increasingly, a legal risk.
The whole “two totalitarianisms” script works because it replaces an argument about property and power with a sermon about morality. Conveniently, sermons do not require evidence, only conformity.
Not two ‘extremisms’ but opposite moral and social logics
At some point this stops being a debate about memory and becomes a test of intellectual honesty. Nazism and Communism are not comparable “extremisms” on opposite ends of a spectrum. They are built on opposite moral and social logics, and forcing them into symmetry does not clarify anything. It distorts.
Nazism is an ideology of exclusion. As Robert Paxton argued, fascism is defined less by a coherent social theory than by hierarchy and mythic mobilisation against imagined enemies. Nazism pushed this to its most extreme form. Its project depends on ranking human beings by birth, assigning collective guilt as destiny, and legitimising domination as a natural order. Its ideological core is a repertoire of pseudo-science and myth: race hierarchy, blood-and-soil nationalism, and fantasies of territorial expansion. Even when it borrows modern administrative tools, it does so to organise conquest and elimination in the interests of a “superior” nation.
Communism, whatever one thinks of its historical outcomes, begins from the opposite premise. Its stated subject is not a race or nation but the working majority, and its horizon is universal emancipation. Marxism is anchored in a socio-economic critique of capitalism: how wealth is produced, how it is appropriated, and why private ownership of social production generates structural inequality and recurrent crisis. One can reject its conclusions and condemn its historical record. But it is a tradition of analysis and political argument, not a mythology of biological destiny.
That is why the “two totalitarianisms” frame is not a neutral classification error. It is a political technique. It takes a doctrine of racial domination and a doctrine of social emancipation, declares them equal as moral pollutants, and then uses the language of democratic hygiene to police the one that still poses an intellectual threat to capitalism. This is why the legal focus drifts so quickly from concrete crimes to symbols, texts, and “propaganda.” The aim is not to understand history, but to manage what can be imagined.
Žižek’s point is useful here: fascism does not merely oppose Communism; it mystifies what Communism names. It displaces a conflict internal to capitalist society into an invented racial struggle, translating class antagonism into the fantasy of an alien contaminant inside the national community. The enemy shifts from a social relation to a body. That shift is the ideological fraud.
This is why the Communist Manifesto still lands with uncomfortable precision: a “spectre” haunting Europe, and a “holy alliance” forming to exorcise it. The fear is not a return of 20th-century regimes. It is the return of a simple question liberal capitalism prefers to treat as illegitimate: if production is social, why is ownership private?
So when Czech law places “Nazi” and “Communist” in the same criminal sentence, it is not only rewriting the past. It is narrowing the future. On New Year’s Day, a handful of Young Social Democrats marked that narrowing in a small but perfectly timed act: 11:55 outside Prague’s Ministry of Justice, five minutes to midnight, under the banner “First they came for the Communists…” They understood what the law’s defenders pretend not to: once politics is moved into the courtroom, the courtroom does not stay politely limited. Like 85 years ago, under the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Communism is illegal in Czechia.