The Reputational Ghost of Socialism:
Why Socialism Still Shines in Professors’ Books
More Than It Ever Did in Life

A century ago, Russians pulled their emperors off their pedestals. Today, they are lifting them back up again. In Mongolia, a towering steel Genghis Khan looks out over the plains — a national hero at home, still viewed as a blood-soaked conqueror across much of Europe and Asia. Reputations, it seems, move like tides — receding, returning, reshaping the shores of memory.
At CARP, our research traces these shifting tides. We study the reputations and defenses of Roman emperors and medieval queens, notorious dictators and fiery revolutionaries, celebrated composers and modern politicians. Each story reveals how character and image are built, battered, and rebuilt, sometimes long after the person is gone.
But here’s the larger question: Can entire social systems have reputations, too? If an individual’s reputation is a reflection of moral character and behavior, can we — by analogy — evaluate something as vast as socialism? Can a society itself be judged by the world’s collective imagination and memory?
It’s a formidable challenge. Yet, without pretending to resolve it, let’s begin a brief conversation about Soviet socialism — the system born in the Soviet Union and later adopted by many nations that proudly called themselves “socialist.” The topic feels especially timely today, when debates about socialism — or rather, about what people believe socialism to be — are more animated than ever, even though most of its modern admirers have never lived under its shadow or its promise.

The Romance of Revisionism

Kristen Ghodsee’s recent reflection on her 2005 book The Red Riviera reads less like historical analysis and more like an act of reputational rescue. She anticipated such a verdict — and, ultimately, earned it. What she offers is a soft-focus portrait of socialism, one that highlights the selective memories of a few while overlooking the collective memories of the many. The piece, steeped in moral nostalgia and carefully curated recollections, insists that in the early 2000s, “for most people in the former Soviet bloc, capitalism sucked.” Perhaps. But for most people, socialism did not exactly sing a joyful tune either.
For decades, two major schools of thought about the Soviet Union have stood in stark contrast. The totalitarian school emphasized the abnormal, pathological, and distinctly negative character of the Soviet system. The revisionist school, by contrast, sought to normalize its reputation — portraying the USSR as simply another society, guided by its own internal logic and recognizable structures. One demonized Soviet socialism; the other normalized and, at times, romanticized it.

The problem with Ghodsee’s essay isn’t empathy — it’s idealization. She is right: listening to ordinary people matters. But having a representative sample — a daunting task — matters even more. Romanticizing people’s recollections, however, often turns scholarship into sentimental theater. We all know how memory works: the past, especially our youth, tends to brighten as the present disappoints. Memory paints the past in the watercolors of naïve charm. Sometimes historians approach truth; in other cases, they drift into revisionist fantasy. This is one of the latter.

The Theater of Memory

People romanticize the past especially when the present fails them. Nostalgia becomes a coping mechanism — a selective reconstruction that blurs hardship into harmony. Older generations, in particular, possess a unique gift for idealizing their youth, especially when it helps them explain away their current anxieties.
What if I, too, were to focus on nostalgia — to let memory do its gentle work? What could possibly be better than this recollection of the socialist past: it’s summertime, the windows are open, and the air smells of fresh strawberries. My grandmother is stirring jam in a heavy pot. My father is coming home from work, his footsteps familiar even before he reaches the door. My cousin and I are racing down the park alley to play soccer.
And the memories are warm: the nicknames of our schoolteachers, the songs from the school dance, the nervous excitement before college exams, the thrill of getting that first pair of Levi’s — bought for a ridiculous sum of money, borrowed from a friend. Nostalgia like this does not necessarily lie; it simply edits. It remembers the warmth, the taste, the laughter — and quietly leaves out the cold, the fear, the silence.
Nostalgia for socialism, as the late sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh once wrote, arises not from dry historical comparisons but from a deeper human need — a way for the enlightened, the aging, the eager, or the disillusioned to reconcile their present frustrations by repainting yesterday in warmer hues. For some others, the idealization of socialism functions as a handy prop in today’s political debates.

The Myth of “Community”

Ghodsee writes of a “powerful sense of community.” I like when people talk about that. Crowded places certainly create togetherness — of a sort. Imagine the overpacked commuter buses that hauled swarms of people to the metro and back, everyone pressed together, breathing the same stale air. Standing room only, and barely that. Or picture the grocery lines — long, restless, and endless. My mother would place me at the back to hold our spot, then hurry to the front to see what was actually being sold. Not much “community” there, unless one counts the silent choreography of elbows, sighs, and complains.
There wasn’t much of it in the communal apartments either — the quintessential birthmark of socialism. My parents and I lived in a single room of a large communal flat, sharing one bathroom and one toilet with three other families. Yes, there were kitchen conversations and occasional laughter, but they were mixed with constant arguments about space, noise, and privacy — hardly the foundation of socialist camaraderie.
Everyone lived behind thin walls of fear and distrust, listening carefully to be sure that an unguarded political remark didn’t travel beyond the plaster. Listening to Voice of America or Radio Liberty? You didn’t need the KGB to find you — your neighbors would. Snitching wasn’t an aberration; it was a social reflex. No wonder self-censorship became second nature: watch what you say — or better yet, say nothing at all.

Culture on a Leash

Ghodsee writes about an “accessible and subsidized cultural life.” True — it was subsidized, but also narrow in scope and tightly controlled. You could perform publicly, yes — but only after your text had been vetted and approved by censors. Whatever the Communist Party sanctioned could appear onstage or in print; everything else disappeared before reaching the public eye.
The censors were not faceless bureaucrats hiding in smoky offices. They were ordinary people — directors, editors, local party secretaries — who could simply say “no.” There was no appeal, no debate. It was a climate of cautious paranoia: “What if…? Better not.” Ironically, socialism reinvented capitalism’s own rule of supply and demand: the more censorship it produced, the more people learned to pretend, to lie, and to speak without meaning what they said. By the 1980s, even as the system decayed, the contradictions persisted. Cancel culture in the Soviet Union was not invented — it was institutionalized.

The Market That Worked

When Elton John (not yet Sir Elton) performed in Leningrad in 1979, a black-market ticket cost about as much as a teacher’s monthly salary. Again — supply and demand. The concert hall was sold out. Two-thirds of the audience were the sons and daughters of officials and the well-connected; the rest simply paid the outrageous price for the chance to hear “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” It was totally worth it. I was there.
The black market thrived — not as a capitalist intrusion but as a hidden core institution of socialism, the only market that truly functioned with efficiency. It became the unofficial sponsor of fashion, entertainment, and everyday comfort. You couldn’t buy stylish shoes; you had to get them — through a friend of a friend, quietly, and often without an outrageous markup. The same rule applied to medical care. To receive decent treatment or obtain effective medicine, you had to know someone — a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, or a friend with connections. Every transaction carried an unspoken understanding: today’s buyer might be tomorrow’s benefactor.
The socialist black market cemented relationships, a kind of camaraderie built not on ideology but on the oldest rule of all: “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Do we really need to romanticize that — to whitewash socialism’s reputation?

The Unequal Gender “Equality”

And then we come to “equality for women.” Employment was, indeed, a constitutional duty. Every woman had a job — by law. Informal affirmative-action rules imposed by the Party ensured a zero gender gap in the powerless representative bodies that existed mostly on paper. Yet name a single woman who sat on the Politburo, the only institution that truly mattered. There was one — Ekaterina Furtseva — and she lasted just three years, until 1961. One woman in nearly seven decades of Soviet rule.
Women made up the majority of the Soviet labor force, yet they remained anchored to the lowest rungs of authority. The celebrated “new Soviet woman” worked two full shifts — one at the factory, school, hospital, or accounting office, and another at home, cooking, cleaning, and washing. After work, she might still find herself standing in a long line for chicken, tomatoes, or bananas — if they hadn’t already vanished from the shelves by 5 p.m. Economists estimate that by the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet women earned about two-thirds to three-quarters of men’s wages. The system preached equality but rewarded masculine industries and management far more generously.

The Concrete Dreams

The author’s remark about “planned neighborhoods with civic amenities” sounds idealistic — and mostly inaccurate. Yes, everything was planned — meticulously so. But in a country defined by chronic shortages, how exactly were “civic amenities” supposed to appear?
I remember taking a bus seven stops, three times a week, to reach my swimming practice. In a city of four million, there were barely five pools suitable for recreational or competitive swimming. There was, however, no shortage of liquor stores — those seemed to require no planning at all.
Urban planning under socialism often meant something else entirely: endless rows of gray concrete boxes, built hastily and identically, stretching toward the horizon. There were beautiful creations, of course, but they were few and far between — especially in showcase cities such as Moscow and Leningrad. The system did not design neighborhoods for living; it designed them for counting and distributing. The rest, as always, people had to improvise on their own.

The Reputational Mirage

Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic, or perhaps my emotions simply differ from the author’s. But I doubt that. I lived in that system. I studied that system. I can judge socialism not only from theory but from experience and research — an experience unclouded by nostalgia, that artificial sweetener of human memory and knowledge.
Nostalgia is a skilled illusionist. It can turn gray concrete into community and censorship into camaraderie. People carry reputations — and so do political systems. Reputations can be crafted, defended, or whitewashed, but they cannot erase reality. The myth of socialist virtue remains just that: a reputational ghost, haunting those who prefer illusion to memory, and memory to truth. When capitalism disappoints, socialism’s ghost looks angelic to some. But ghosts are deceptive company.
Winston Churchill once quipped, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” My old teacher amended that line: “Wrong — the inherent virtue of socialism is the unequal sharing of miseries.”