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Shortly before the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, marking the last days of the Cold War, Irish communists attended East Germanys 40th anniversary celebration.

Possibly the smallest member of the Soviet Unions global network, the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) under Michael ORiordan had to compete with an Irish rival seeking the Russians attention. The Workers Party, with seven TDs in Dil ireann, was going places in ultra-conservative Ireland, at least in the eyes of the Soviet embassy in Dublin. Over the course of the decade, leading political figures, both Fianna Fil and Fine Gael, accused it of having a Moscow-directed agenda aiming to turn Ireland into another Cuba.

Earlier in 1989 the dominant figure in the WP, Sen Garland, asked the embattled East German regime for financial help. He had previously appealed to Moscow for 1 million, warning that special activities a euphemism for Official IRA fundraising damaged the partys public image.

Before Mikhail Gorbachev took over in the Kremlin, Garland had good reason to believe the Soviets could give him urgently-needed funds. Imprisoned during the IRAs Border campaign in the 1950s, Garland, with Cathal Goulding, afterwards led the republican movement in a leftwards political direction.

Garland and Goulding had much in common with ORiordan. The latter had been interned with Goulding and other republicans during the second World War, and, like Garland, had seen military action and been wounded (in ORiordans case during the Spanish civil war).

The three men acquired a simplistic pro-Soviet, anti-American world view when competition between the two superpowers dominated global politics. In the 1950s, when Ireland was described as the most viscerally anti-communist country in the world, the public saw imprisoned churchmen in Hungary and Yugoslavia Cardinal Mindszenty and Archbishop Stepinac as Cold War martyrs. With the help of the Garda Special Branch, Dublins Catholic archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, kept detailed dossiers on communists such as ORiordan.

Neither British nor Irish officials believed these reds were harmless. They saw the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) as providing their link with Russia: directing them, and, more importantly, the Connolly Association, which attempted to politicise the many Irish exiles in Britain. The authorities in Dublin did not allow the Irish States non-aligned status, its military neutrality, to prevent them joining the Wests struggle against Soviet communism.

Col Dan Bryan of G2, the army intelligence directorate, argued that Ireland should assist the Ntto powers. In the Department of Justice, Peter Berry did the same.

If Moscows express adherents were too isolated to pose a threat in either Irish jurisdiction, the republican movement was a different matter. The authorities, north and south, saw that a communist-influenced IRA had potential appeal. Berry proposed towards the end of the 1960s that the Fianna Fil government should attempt to split the IRA, to drive a wedge between the rural members the old faithfuls and the Dublin-based cohort advocating a workers socialist republic.

The British ambassador in Dublin saw Northern Irelands civil rights crisis through a Cold War lens: the Marxist-influenced IRA, its leaders looking towards Moscow, had manipulated the agitation on the streets.

But the clamour for guns in Belfasts Catholic ghettos in August 1969, following the outbreak of sectarian violence, provided republican traditionalists with a reason to split the republican movement. Disturbed at the left-wing rhetoric of Garland and Goulding perceived to be a Marxist or alien ideology the believers in the physical-force tradition set up the Provisional IRA.

In 1970 the American embassy quoted a senior Garda officer as saying that communism had advanced further in the past two or three years than in the previous 40. The embassy followed Washingtons instructions and monitored left-wing activity. Details in these reports were supplied by an authoritative Irish security source. Washington heard that communists who wanted a republic friendly to Russia had attempted to take control of the pre-split republican movement.

The outbreak of armed conflict in the North created an opportunity for the Soviet Union to make trouble for Britain, its Nato adversary, and Moscow looked with increasing sympathy on the post-split Official IRA as another liberation movement.

Whitehall feared Dublin could become a Soviet espionage hub, with the Official republican organisation acting as a proxy. Using ORiordan as an intermediary, the Official IRA later received arms shipments from the Soviets. Northern Irelands violence spilling over the Border led to fears of instability on the scale of an Irish Cuba.

Following the Bloody Sunday killings and the burning of the British embassy in Dublin, in January 1972, the British appealed to President Nixon -to put pressure on the Irish government to act decisively against the IRA. Otherwise, according to the Foreign Office, a Western democracy might plunge into anarchy.

Russian diplomats arrived in Dublin in 1974. The papal nuncio and other dignitaries mingled with old revolutionaries such as Peadar ODonnell when the embassy threw a party. Times had changed since people had said the rosary outside Dalymount Park when Yugoslavia played. Dublin did not become an espionage hub, and Soviet mischief-making about Northern Ireland consisted mainly of propaganda attacks against British colonialism.

If it was ironic that Ireland could host two tiny Marxist parties, one more pro-Soviet than the other, it was doubly so that they should fall out with each other. In the late 1970s the CPI criticised its rivals U-turn on the national question which depicted the Provisional IRAs war in the same light as the Black and Tans campaign.

Garland then found himself at odds with the Soviet blocs enthusiastic support for republican hunger strikers in Long Kesh who were seeking restoration of political status for paramilitary prisoners.

Abandoning traditional republican demands cost the Official movement dear in the North. On the other hand, in the South, the Workers Party enjoyed limited electoral success in the 1980s. British and American diplomats kept an eye on it, but there was no question of it playing a leading role in creating an Irish Cuba.

Garland had few friends at home, as the British embassy astutely observed, and his partys friendships abroad withered when the Soviet-led world fell asunder. The fallout from this 1989 earthquake did not do ORiordan much damage; his party had little or no political presence. Garlands party, however, lost everything when six of its seven TDs walked out following two years of fractious debate. The Cold War in Ireland was all over now.John Mulqueen is the author of An Alien Ideology: Cold War Perceptions of the Irish Republican Left, published by Liverpool University Press

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Another Cuba? Irish republicanism and the Cold War - The Irish Times

FOLLOWING the long tenure of the late Derek Foster, Helen Goodman was parachuted into a safe Labour seat, so safe, that even through Tony Blairs 11 year reign, Bishop Auckland was not regarded as worthy of investment.

When I was a boy, my father would quote my grandmother Labour will promise all sorts of goodies but where is the money coming from? Sixty years down the road, Labour is promising all sorts of goodies but where is the money coming from?

They will say anything to get into power then make a total mess if they do.

Socialism is diluted communism, a rose by another name, and there is no place for it in this, one of the most advanced nations in the world the clue is in the title, Great Britain.

We got to this level through hard graft, innovation, entrepreneurial skills and being prepared to put our heads above the parapet. This is the Tory ideology.

Socialism smothers and suppresses these virtues, as does communism. This is the Labour ideology.

Do not support Labour because we have always been Labour. Think outside the box and vote Conservative.

Harold MacKenley, Cockfield

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Letters: 'Socialism is diluted communism, a rose by another name' - The Northern Echo

In the midst of the presidential elections, and with feelings running high, Romanias historical community has been rocked by a bitter debate over the involvement of fascist prisoners in the regime of torture that took place at Piteti prison between 1949 and 1951. Historians at the centre of the controversy have received death threats from their critics on the far right and the discussions have revealed deep cleavages around the memory of fascism and communism.

The Piteti Experiment, in which roughly 1,000 prisoners were forced to torture each other into insanity and sometimes to death, has become the quintessential example of the evil of Romanian communism. Led by Alexandru Bogdanovici and Eugen urcanu, who had been imprisoned for their involvement in the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael, prisoners incarcerated at Suceava apparently volunteered to run a reeducation program for themselves and other prisoners. They formed the Organization of Prisoners with Communist Convictions (ODCC), confessed their past crimes and beliefs, studied communist literature, and persuaded other prisoners to do the same.

urcanu was transferred to Piteti prison in December 1949 and given use of Hospital Room No. 4. Here he and other members of the ODCC began an experiment on other legionary prisoners. Torture would begin suddenly and brutally, lasting day and night for weeks on end. They would regularly beat the victims with clubs and whips, force them to eat and drink their own feces, crucify them, sodomize them while screaming blasphemies and jump on victims until they died. When prisoners begged to join the ODCC, urcanu made them confess their anti-communist thoughts and actions before others, accuse themselves of immorality and then join him in torturing other prisoners.

The victims of Piteti are seen today as anti-communist martyrs. Individuals tortured in other communist prisons, including people incarcerated as fascists, are even widely regarded as saints because of the unique spiritual experiences they had in prison.

The details of the Piteti Experiment are well known and have been the subject of a number of books and research articles. The vast majority of studies are based on survivor testimonies and the public trials of the perpetrators. The files of the Securitate, the secret police who ran the prisons, are now available for researchers but need to be treated with caution because they often deliberately misrepresent evidence and include testimonies produced under torture.

Mihai Demetriade, a researcher at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), is an expert on these files. He has authored a number of detailed studies on reeducation within communist prisons, making extensive use of Securitate records. Demetriade reevaluated the Piteti experiment in a long and detailed journal article published in 2017 but his research went unnoticed until he gave an interview about it on Radio France Internationale (RFI) on 29 October 2019.

Demetriade pointed out that the Securitates primary goal was to extract information from prisoners, not to brainwash them, that the repertoires of torture used at Piteti had been used by legionaries against other legionaries in the Nazi concentration camp at Rostok during the Second World War and that the survivor testimonies were written by people who were themselves former fascists. Moreover, he showed that factionalism within the Legion during the late 1940s had been heavily influenced by the mass incarceration and torture of legionaries by the Securitate. Legionary internal politics, that is, was in part a product of Securitate violence.

By arguing that the victims of Piteti might not have been entirely innocent and that legionaries had their own reasons for attacking other legionaries, Demetriade questioned the sacred cow of the public memory of state socialism that the Piteti Experiment was a uniquely evil example of communist atrocities perpetrated against innocent victims.

Demetriades interview was widely denounced. Comments on the radios website insisted that he be sent to prison for his opinions and he received anonymous online threats calling him a Bolshevik, trash, and making obscene comments about what they will do to his mother. The interviewer, William Totok, received a death threat signed by the sons of Avram Iancu, a nationalist organization created by the Securitate during the Cold War to intimidate Romanians in exile who they thought besmirched the countrys honour.

Radu Preda, a nationalist theologian and the director of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania (IICCMER), condemned Demetriades claims in a press release as an act of intellectual vandalism, stating that it is sad and revolting to realize that people who have researched the archives of the dictatorship of the proletariat have not understood anything from the drama that took place in the prison system. Radu himself has never published research on the history of fascism or on communist prisons.

Two other senior figures in IICCMER have condemned Predas press release, claiming that they were not consulted before it was issued. As Alexandru Florian, the director of the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, points out this is not the first time [Radu Preda] has publicly supported the memory of the interwar extreme right. In 2015 five leading scholars including William Totok resigned from the IICCMERs scientific board in protest against Predas appointment because of his pro-fascist statements.

Constantin Buchet, the president of CNSAS and Demetriades employer, immediately announced that the claims of Demetriade and his colleague, Mdlin Hodor, are offensive to those who suffered in communist prisons and they severely harm the reputation of CNSAS by their association with it. CNSAS is run by a council of experts, however, three of whom have said that Buchets announcement was never discussed with the council and does not represent the opinion of the organization. Documents from the Councils archive should support authentic scientific debate, they write, and not hagiographies or propagandistic mythologies.

Passionate debates about what can and cannot be said about the Piteti Experiment continue on social media and in the press. They are increasingly divided along political lines, exposing raw wounds exacerbated by the presidential elections. The discussion shows how deeply memories about fascism and communism shape Romanian identity and party politics. Sadly, despite the amount of ink that has been spilt on this topic it is still not clear whether anyone has actually read the 173-page study that sits at the centre of the controversy.

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Romania's history wars: on the sufferings of fascist saints - Open Democracy

Hungary celebrated as one when Marina Gera, a 35-year-old actress, became the first ever Hungarian to receive an International Emmy Award the Oscar of television films. The Emmy Awards jury named Ms Gera the Best Actress of the Year, awarding her outstanding performance in Eternal Winter, a 2018 Hungarian drama about the suffering of Hungarian prisoners in Soviet Gulags,

The film tells the heart-breaking story of a Hungarian-Swabian family, in Hungarys Tolna county, at the end of World War II. Irn, a young woman, played by Ms Gera, is waiting for her husband to return from the Eastern Front, when she and other women from her village are summoned by the then-occupying Soviet soldiers to work in the corn fields. Instead, the women are put on trains and taken to the middle of the Soviet Union, thousands of kilometres away from their homeland. They were sent there for malenky robot, which what the Hungarians called the forced labour they had to suffer in the freezing Soviet internment camps of Siberia.

Eternal Winter is one of the most important Hungarian films of the past years. It is a commemoration of the sins of communism and a recompense for the victims, said Lilla Gyngysi, a Hungarian movie critic.

Directed by Attila Szsz, the film is indeed a tribute to the more than 600,000 Hungarians who were forcefully taken to the USSRs labour camps, but that is not all. It is also a story of compassion and love. During the time she is forced to work in a dark Soviet coal mine, Irn gets to know Rajmund, a Hungarian man, who is also imprisoned and who teaches her how to survive. The two pursue an unlikely, but unfulfilled relationship, given that both of them have families back in Hungary who they believe are waiting for them.

Mr Szszs drama brilliantly reminds us that although one persons struggle in such a camp is to save oneself day-by-day, it is also about how the oppressed can help each other, when they see no hope of escaping the cruel Soviet reality.

Eternal Winter is by far not the only Hungarian film about the gulags, as several documentaries have been made about them; however, it is the first ever feature film to show this dark side of the Soviet Union, which unsurprisingly was also the films mission. It wanted to tell the story of those who had been there and what they had had to face. Accordingly, during some of the discussions and music and you can hear is a terrifying background noise: of prisoners suffering from hunger, diseases, exhaustion, freezing temperatures and beatings from Soviet guards.

It was a difficult film to make, since we had to show circumstances in it, which we have never imagined before. We havent really had much opportunity to bring [the full reality] back, Mr Szsz said, noting that he had his doubts about whether such a reality could really be displayed. However, he was relieved when he heard the reaction of the audience.

I am very proud to be a Hungarian, at this moment, Ms Gera said, after the film was named the Best European TV film by Prix Europa in 2018. We are from different countries, but we have the same problems. Every country has an untold story. she went on to say, referring to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe which were the states that suffered the most under Soviet rule.

Today we are commemorating all the Hungarian victims who suffered in the Soviet Union. So, I would like to dedicate this prize to their memory, she said, pointing not just to the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians, but the many millions who were abused, beaten, tortured or murdered by communism.

She also offered to share her prize with Mr Szsz, who is the first Hungarian director to portray the fate of Hungarians in Soviet internment camps in a drama.

A real tragedy cannot be shown its fullness; only the people in it, the films creators said when Eternal Winter was announced.

Eternal Winter was released on February 25, 2018, the Day of Commemoration about the Victims of Communism in Hungary.

Photo: official website of the movie

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Hungary's First Emmy Award Dedicated to the Victims of Soviet Gulags - Emerging Europe

The recent letter from Muhammad Yungai, "Maybe capitalism isn't such a great system," shows that most people know very little about capitalism, socialism, communism, or slavery.

Yungai's example of his one-dollar charge turning into $40 is not capitalism; it's greed. Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods and by prices, production, and distribution of goods that are determined mainly in a free market. In a capitalist society, anyone can have an idea and start a business, except when government over-regulates.

Socialist and communist nations run almost all businesses. In socialist and communist nations, only the top party members live very well. In communist nations, you own nothing. Two of my friends' family homes were taken in Cuba by high-ranking Communist Party members because they liked the view. Only capitalism gives people an incentive to improve. Slavery has been going on for thousands of years in all nations all over the world. Slavery did not just take place in the United States. Slavery still goes on in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Most people in this country are homeless because of drugs or mental disorder. Some places have homeless people because of over-regulationsuch as in California with its strict building regulations. People need to study world history.

Larry Villere

retired postal worker

Metairie

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Letters: Think capitalism is bad? Try communism - The Advocate