Christmas under Communism

Most interesting article at American Thinker about what it was like in Communist countries at Christmas. Here's an excerpt:

Christianity can survive long periods of oppression, but in the meantime, individual lives can be terribly harmed. In Eastern Europe, hundreds of millions of human beings suffered though a grinding half-century of Communist rule. Lacking the wisdom and inspiration of traditional faith, generations passed through life like hollow men passing from Communist youth leagues to Communist workers' associations to communist pensioner schemes.

Yet one of the inescapable paradoxes of Communism is the fact that the godless state, which professes the virtue of materialism, can then so completely fail to provide even the material necessities that most in the West take for granted. Although there were rubber chickens and wooden pop guns in the market, there was a general absence of everything else. By the time Christmas rolled around, there was little variety of food, and milk had disappeared from the stores. Fresh fruit, including oranges and bananas, vanished entirely, as did all fresh vegetables, except for an aging stock of potatoes, carrots, and turnips. Other than some suspiciously outdated and moldy-looking sausages, meat was in short supply. What there was, along with the potatoes, carrots, turnips, and sausages, was the bland production of the state canneries: jams, jellies, canned vegetables and fruits, potted meat and chicken, and an adequate quantity of bread to be washed down with ample supplies of locally produced plum brandy, beer, and wine.

It might seem that the state had at least provided an adequate caloric intake, but every day I saw people of all ages, from young women with infants cradled in one arm to old men in ragged suits, fumbling through garbage bins for bread crusts and bones.

Christmas was also accompanied by the unrelieved cold. The Communist state had guaranteed heating and electricity for all, just as it had guaranteed universal free medical care, but blackouts were frequent and long, and water shortages predictable: two days off, one day on. Every night, the heat was turned off at nine o'clock. I slept in a cold room under a mountain of blankets, sometimes lying awake as my breath rose like smoke in the moonlight. Then I got very sick, but I refused to be taken to the hospital for fear of being made sicker.

Each morning, a shabbily dressed population reemerged on the streets, crouching against the cold, beaten down by hardship, hunger, untreated disease, and the extinction of all human dreams. Walking the streets of a Communist city in late December, with the unshoveled snow packed down into a treacherous sheet of ice, shivering because no matter where one went, inside or out, one would still be cold -- this was the reality of a Communist Christmas.

But it was not just the bleak physical conditions that ground people down and caused them to die in their forties and fifties. For generations under Communist rule, life passed with nothing more wondrous or resplendent than the material facts of work, consumption, and reproduction. During the Communist era, most people in Eastern Europe grew up as confirmed atheists, smug in the certainty that nothing really mattered except getting along in life and securing as much of society's meager production of goods and services as possible. From this there was no reprieve except cheap alcohol and foul, locally produced cigarettes.