The Passing of Soviet-Style Communism Is Nothing to Mourn

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

 

Thirty years ago, “Poland rationed sugar and flour while its citizens were paid one-tenth what West Germans earned,” the Associated Press reported this week. “Today, the economy of the country has edged past Switzerland to become the world’s 20th largest with more than $1 trillion in annual output.”

 

That’s quite a success story. Indeed, Poland’s per capita GDP is now roughly in line with the European Union average. It has a thriving entrepreneurial culture, a growing middle class, and is becoming an investment hub. Additionally, Poland’s largess has allowed it to field a first-rate military, rendering it one of NATO’s most capable member states.

 

No one should call Poland’s revitalization from the days of the Jaruzelski regime a “miracle.” Miracles are inexplicable. The Poles’ success is due to good, old-fashioned capitalism, and the innovative, creative, and dynamic energies it encourages.

 

But the Associated Press’s reporters appear to think that they would be remiss if they didn’t put in a good word for Soviet-style communism. “As oppressive as it was,” the AP’s throat-clearing began, “communism contributed by breaking down old social barriers and opening higher education to factory and farmworkers who had no chance before.”

 

Gesturing in the direction of the “oppressive” communist regime in Warsaw only to yadda-yadda it away understates that regime’s crimes. The survivors of the dissidents who were killed at Poznań and the Gdańsk shipyards might be able to summon stronger words. The repression of the Solidarity movement was a touch more invasive than the AP lets on, as was the regime’s persecution of Catholic worshipers and clergy alike. The state’s secret police made daily life a misery for millions. It turned neighbors and friends into informants, family members into censors, and colleagues into collaborators.

 

Every so often, we’re treated to gauzy reflections on what life was like under Soviet communism from naïve Westerners who never experienced it. The thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall occasioned, for example, an outpouring of nostalgia for a fictionalized German Democratic Republic among dead-enders in the West. Most often, noxious “Ostalgie” takes a form similar to the AP’s apologia for the values communism encouraged.

 

The captive nations bridled with Moscow’s yoke at least had a sense of social solidarity, they contend. Sure, Soviet-style socialism was inefficient. But economic growth isn’t everything. And the public sector’s power to confiscate wealth from productive sectors and funnel it to the interests favored by the state gave a leg up to those who do not worship at the altar of competitive enterprise. And so on.

 

Sometimes, the West’s few remaining fellow travelers act on their commitment to the communist international, as the Democratic Socialists of America did when they descended on Cuba recently in an attempt to convince the Cuban people that they’ve never had it so good.

 

The Cuban regime had for years resisted entreaties from the likes of its allies in Beijing, for example, to introduce horizontal integration into its vertical economy. Now, under intense pressure from Washington, the Cuban regime is at least contemplating reform. If those reforms are implemented and succeed in providing Cubans with economic relief, paving the way for the liberalization that often (but not always) accompanies the development of an influential and civically participatory middle class, there will be no end to the eulogies for the communitarian cohesion the Cubans themselves took for granted.

 

It was ever thus. Naïve Westerners with no personal experience of any different model perceive themselves equipped to lecture those who languish under communism, insisting that they should subordinate their aspirations for themselves and their loved ones to the nebulous goal of oneness – even if that oneness is only the shared experience of poverty and subjugation.

 

Fortunately, the hostages who stagnate in the world’s few remaining socialist states never seem willing to take their advice.