We condemn the new anti-communist decision of the Fiala government and the Czech Parliament, which criminalizes ‘any form of support or promotion of the communist movement’ as part of the changes to the criminal code that were adopted.

We express our solidarity with the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, and with the communists in the Czech Republic in opposition to this unacceptable development that criminalizes political life in the country. We reiterate our opposition to the idea of outlawing the Communist Party in the Czech Republic.

The criminalization of communism promoted in the Czech Republic is an application of the unhistorical “two extremes” theory, the equation of the monster of fascism–Nazism with socialism–communism and the unscientific approaches about “totalitarian regimes”. These are an integral part of the European Union’s policy, and have been implemented for years in more than a third of its member states, where various kinds of bans have been put in place against Communist Parties, communist symbols and communist ideology, as well as the entire historical period of building socialism in the USSR and other European states.

This is not the first time that such measures have been sought in the Czech Republic, but have been cancelled by the people’s struggle. This new attempt to criminalize communism is taking place in the year marking the 80^th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the Great Anti-Fascist Victory of the Peoples. Attempting to identify the USSR, the Red Army and the Communist Parties that led the heroic struggle of the partisan movements against the Nazi occupiers, with the Nazi-Fascist beast is a great provocation to the peoples. This insults the memory of the millions of fighters who sacrificed their lives for the anti-fascist Victory, as well as their children and grandchildren.

The attempted distortion of history and the memory of peoples and the prohibition of the free movement of ideas and political opposition within the so-called “freedom and democracy” of the EU, has gone so far as to demolish anti-fascist monuments and restore and glorify local fascists who joined the German Nazi Wehrmacht and the SS as heroes, as has been happening for years in the Baltic countries.

What ‘hurts’ the capitalists, their governments and the EU, especially in the countries where socialism was established, is that the peoples now have a benchmark. They can see the dead ends of the barbaric exploitative system served by bourgeois governments, and they are filled with nostalgia for socialism, which despite its shortcomings, offered people an overwhelmingly higher standard of living 50 years ago than capitalism does today.

Such efforts whitewash the fascists and their collaborators. They are grist to the mill of their nostalgists today and are being used to escalate the anti-people attacks on workers’ and people’s rights by the EU and its member states.

On the 80^th anniversary of the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples, we declare that capitalist barbarity and anti-communism will fail and that historical truth will triumph. The peoples will once again take centre stage and the 21^st century will truly be a century of new workers’ revolutions.

ATHENS 05/06/2025

THE PRESS OFFICE OF THE CC OF THE KKE