Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

by Lea Ypi

Executing leaders, imprisoning spies or sanctioning former Party members, would have fuelled the conflicts even further, sharpening the desire for revenge, spilling more blood. It seemed more sensible to erase responsibility altogether, to pretend everyone had been innocent all along. The only wrongdoers it was legitimate to name were those who had already died; those who could neither explain nor absolve themselves. All the rest turned into victims. All the survivors were winners. With no perpetrators, only ideas were left to blame. Communism was considered a vision so hopeless for some, so murderous for others, that the sole mention of the word would be met with either scorn or hatred. This revolution, the velvet one, was a revolution of people against concepts.

One might also have called it theft, except that an individual appropriating common resources constitutes the very foundation of private property. Bottom-up privatization would be a better description.

My father and grandmother never took any interest, partly because they did not think the properties could be recovered, and partly because they doubted that they should be.

In the end, there would be winners and losers. So what? Everyone knew that; everyone consented to the rules. It was in the nature of the game. It was a competition after all, even if healthy.

Socialism had succeeded in ripping the veil off women’s heads, but not in the minds of their men. It had managed to tear chains carrying crosses from their wives’ chests, but those chains still shackled their husbands’ brains. There was little to do other than wait for the times to change or, as my mother saw it, to defend yourself.

It was either a failure of institutions or a lack of imagination that my mother lived all her life in a socialist state convinced that one can only ever fight against others, never alongside them. I would have offered my sympathy, if I hadn’t thought she would feel insulted.

There was this lingering suspicion, or perhaps residual cultural memory, that without social control greater individual freedom would entail the freedom of individuals to harm themselves.

There was no politics left, only policy. And the purpose of policy was to prepare the state for the new era of freedom, and to make people feel as if they belonged to ‘the rest of Europe’.

I accepted that history repeats itself. I remember thinking: is this what my parents experienced? Is this what they wanted me to experience? Is this what losing hope looks like, becoming indifferent to categorization, to nuance, to making distinctions, to assessing the plausibility of different interpretations, to truth?

My family equated socialism with denial: the denial of who they wanted to be, of the right to make mistakes and learn from them, to explore the world on one’s own terms. I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit privilege, turning a blind eye to injustice.

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.

I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile, and to continue the struggle.