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At a seminar in Riga, dedicated to Otto von Habsburg, Rajmund Fekete, director of the Institute for the Research of Communism, highlighted that the tempting tale of communism was easier to believe in the West as in regions that were once part of the „story”. He added that Nazism was thrown at the stinking dump of history yet in the Western world communism – that has more than 100 million victims – is still considered to be a legitimate ideology. Rajmund Fekete emphasized that future generations need to learn about the real nature and operation of the red dictatorship in which very mission the House of Terror Museum has an outstanding role.

The conference that was organized at the Hungarian Embassy in Riga was also attended by Egils Levits, former president of Latvia, György Urkuti, extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador of Hungary to Latvia, Bence Kocsev from the Otto von Habsburg Foundation in Budapest, Eduard Habsburg, diplomat and writer and last but by no means least Gunārs Nāgels, former director of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. Rajmund Fekete pointed out that the communist ideology was eager to attract tens of millions of people to a fictional fairyland. A place where everyone is happy and healthy. A place where everybody gets whatever he wants. There is only one thing to be done in return: leaving their old life behind. Needless to say, it quickly turned out that fairyland is brittle, ruthless and constantly takes its victims. And even though some may have managed to escape, there will be nobody who’d believe them because communists will claim they are liars.  

Rajmund Fekete underlined:

Instead of abundance, it has created a shortage of goods, instead of equality, it has doubled the distribution of rations to party cadres and created a new ruling class – the elite. Instead of fraternity, it has established a system of suspicion and generalized infiltration. Instead of freedom, it has woven a cobweb of the most basic, the most absurd, the most humiliating constraints over society, which it has kept in fear by means of the most ruthless terror.

He further added that the communist dictatorship not only punished those opposing it, dragging them in GULAG-camps, but also its very own cadres. They were sat on the dock: the comrade was sent to the gallows by comrades, if the order said so. Nobody was safe. The red dictatorship destroyed traditional societal links, so that the atomized, uprooted society had no shelter whatsoever.

Rajmund Fekete underlined that communist ideology was believed by those who have never for a moment lived in it: countless members of the Western world showed understanding and empathy towards this inhumane dictatorship. Just as Paul Hollander, a Hungarian-born sociologist who left for the West in 1956, has put it.

The director added that while in the Western world Nazism was - quite rightly - thrown to the stinking dump of history, both morally and intellectually, yet the debate on communist systems and its ideological nature is not finished. Even though more than three decades have passed since the fall of communism and the regime change, we can declare that communism is not dead. Its Western representatives are to be found on university campuses, at institutions, in the media and in politics. Jean-Claude Juncker, as President of the European Commission, unveiled a statue of Karl Marx with Chinese money, the leader of the European Green Party could quote Lenin in the European Parliament and not that long ago it was the communist Bella Ciao that played up Strasbourg.

Rajmund Fekete finds it especially important that future generations also learn about the nature of dictatorships and understand what their parents and grandparents had to endure so that they may live freely. The House of Terror Museum has put next to one another the Nazi and the communist dictatorship along this logic back in 2002. This is also why it is essential that the people of the Baltic and the Carpathian Basin have come to understand the price of freedom and its significance, and thus have a much better sense of their national heritage and identity than the citizens of Western Europe.

Rajmund Fekete concluded his speech with a quote from Otto von Habsburg – the one that he also wrote in the guest book of the House of Terror Museum.

The one who does not know where he comes from may not know where he is going, because he is not even sure where he is.