Lea Ypi, Free, 2021 ✓

That first conversation about death and what happens afterwards was repeated in school several years later. Teacher Nora told us that in the olden days people gathered in large buildings called churches and mosques to sing songs and recite poems dedicated to someone or something they called God, which we had to distinguish carefully from the gods of Greek mythology like Zeus, Hera or Poseidon. Nobody knew what that single God looked like, but different people had different interpretations. […] In the past, religious groups had bitterly fought each other, killing and maiming innocent people in disputes about whose prophet was right. But not in our country. In our country, the Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews had always respected one another, because they cared about the nation more than they cared about their disagreements on what God looked like. Then the Party had come, more people started to read and write, and the more they learned about how the world worked, the more they discovered that religion was an illusion, something that the rich and powerful used to supply the poor with false hopes, promising them justice and happiness in another life.

We asked if there is another life after we die.

‘There is not, said teacher Nora with characteristic conviction. She explained it was all a way to make people stop fighting for their rights in the only life they had, so that the rich could benefit.

Capitalists, who did not necessarily believe in God themselves, wanted to keep him because it made it easier to exploit workers and blame a magical being rather than themselves for the misery they caused. But once people learned to read and write, and the Party was there to guide them, they stopped relying on God. […]

We knew we would never meet these poor children, humiliated and oppressed by the capitalists, because they could never travel. We sympathized with their predicament but did not think we shared their fate. We knew it was difficult for us to travel abroad because we were surrounded by enemies. Moreover, our holidays were subsidized by the Party. Perhaps one day the Party would be powerful enough to have defeated all our enemies, and would pay for everyone to travel abroad too. In any case, we were already in the best place. They had nothing. We knew we did not have everything. But we had enough, we all had the same things, and we had what mattered most : real freedom.

In capitalism, people claimed to be free and equal, but this was only on paper because only the rich could take advantage of the rights available. Capitalists had made their money by stealing land and plundering resources all over the world, and by selling black people as slaves. ‘Do you remember Black Boy?’ teacher Nora asked when we read Richard Wright’s autobiography in school. ‘In the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a poor black person cannot be free. The police are after him. The law works against him.’

We had freedom for all, not just for the exploiters. We worked, not for the capitalists but for ourselves, and we shared the products of our work. We didn’t know greed, ot have to feel envy. Everyone’s needs were satisfied, and the Party helped us develop our talents. If you were particularly gifted in maths, or dancing, or poetry or whatever, you could go to the House of the Pioneers and find a science club, or a dancing group, or a literary circle in which to practise your skills. ‘Can you imagine, if your parents lived in capitalism, they would have to pay for all these things,’ teacher Nora would say. ‘People work like dogs, and the capitalist doesn’t even give them what they deserve because, otherwise, how would he make a profit? Which means that part of the time they work for nothing, like the slaves in ancient Rome. For the other part, they receive a salary, and if they wanted their children to develop their talents, they would have to pay for private lessons, which of course they can’t afford. What freedom is that?’

I remembered vaguely something called the Berin Wall protest the year before. We had talked about it in school, and teacher Nora explained it was related to the fight between imperialism and revisionism, and how they were each holding a mirror to the other, but both mirrors were broken. None of it concerned us. Our ennemies regularly tried to topple our government, but they failed just as regularly. In the late forties, we split up with Yugoslavia when the latter broke with Stalin. In the sixties, when Khrushchev dishonoured Stalin’s legacy and accused us of ‘leftist nationalist deviationism’, we interrupted diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In the late seventies, we abandoned our alliance with China when the latter decided to become rich and betray the Cultural Revolution. It didn’t matter. We were surrounded by powerful foes, but knew ourselves to be on the right side of history. Every time our enemies threatened us, the Party, supported by the people, emerged stronger. Throughout the centuries, we had fought mighty empires and shown the rest of the world how even a small nation on the edge of the Balkans could find the strength to resist. Now we were leading the struggle to achieve the most difficult transition : that from socialist to communist freedom — from a revolutionary state governed by just laws to a classless society, where the state itself would wither away.

Why had socialism come to an end? Only a few months before, in our moral education class, teacher Nora had explained that socialism was not perfect, it was not like communism would be when it arrived. Socialism was a dictatorship, she said, the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was different, and certainly better, than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that ruled in Western imperialist states. In socialism, the state was controlled by the workers, rather than by capital, and the law served the workers’ interests, not the interests of those who wanted to increase their profits. But she made it clear that socialism had problems too. Class struggle was not overt. We had many external enemies, like the Soviet Union, which had long ago given up on the ideal of communism and turned into a repressive imperialist state that sent tanks to crush smaller countries. We also had many internal enemies. The people who had once been rich and had lost all their privileges and property kept plotting to undermine the rule of the workers and deserved to be punished. Still, with time, the proletarian struggle would prevail. When people grow up in a humane system, and children are educated in the right ideas, teacher Nora said, they internalize them. Class enemies become fewer in number, and class struggle first softens, then disappears. That is when communism really starts, and why it is superior to socialism : it does not need the law to punish anyone, and it liberates human beings once and for all. Contrary to what our enemies’ propaganda suggested, communism was not the repression of the individual but the first time in the history of humanity in which we could be fully free.

I’d always thought there was nothing better than communism. Every morning of my life I woke up wanting to do something to make it happen faster. But in December 1990, the same human beings who had been marching to celebrate socialism and the advance towards communism took to the streets to demand its end. […]

In the past, one would have been arrested for wanting to leave. Now that nobody was stopping us from emigrating, we were no longer welcome on the other side. The only thing that had changed was the colour of the police uniforms. We risked being arrested not in the name of our own government but in the name of other states, those same governments who used to urge us to break free in the past. The West had spent decades criticizing the East for its closed borders, funding campaigns to demand freedom of movement, condemning the immorality of states committed to restricting the right to exit. Our exiles used to be received as heroes. Now they were treated like criminals.

Perhaps freedom of movement had never really mattered. It was easy to defend it when someone else was doing the dirty work of imprisonment. But what value does the right to exit have if there is no right to enter? Were borders and walls reprehensible only when they served to keep people in, as opposed to keeping them out? The border guards, the patrol boats, the detention and repression of immigrants that were pioneered in southern Europe for the first time in those years would become standard practice over the coming decades. The West, initially unprepared for the arrival of thousands of people wanting a different future, would soon perfect a system for excluding the most vulnerable and attracting the more skilled, all the while defending borders to ‘protect our way of life’. And yet, those who sought to emigrate did so because they were attracted to that way of life. Far from posing a threat to the system, they were its most ardent supporters.

In some ways, I have gone full circle: When you see a system change once, it’s not that difficult to believe that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me, it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all the people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them take their course. If I do nothing, their efforts will have been wasted, their lives will have been meaningless.

My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall short of that ideal. But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain for ever divided. I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile, and to continue the struggle.