The Czech Republic has taken a significant step in its post-communist legal reforms by amending its criminal code to equate the promotion of communism with that of Nazi ideology. President Petr Pavel, a former Communist Party member, signed the amendment into law, which introduces prison terms of one to five years for those who establish, support, or promote totalitarian movements that suppress human rights and freedoms or incite racial, ethnic, national, religious, or class-based hatred.
This legislative move follows calls from the Czech government-funded Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, with co-author Michael Rataj claiming that it is ‘illogical and unfair’ to treat the two ideologies differently. Rataj emphasized a societal perception where Nazism is seen as the crime of a foreign, German nation, while communism is often excused as ‘our own’ ideology due to its roots in the country.
The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), part of the ‘Enough’ alliance, has strongly opposed the amendment, calling it a politically motivated attempt to push the party outside the law and intimidate its critics. Despite polling at around 5%, the party could potentially return to parliament in the October 2025 elections.
Prague has engaged in removing or altering hundreds of Soviet-era monuments, following the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev. This decommunization trend is shared by several Eastern European countries, including Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, which have passed laws effectively equating communism with Nazism. Moscow views these measures as politically driven attempts to rewrite history, as Russia argues they distort the truth about World War II, when the Soviet Union lost 27 million lives fighting to liberate Europe from the Nazis.
President Vladimir Putin signed a law in July 2021 prohibiting ‘publicly equating the USSR with Nazi Germany’ and banning the ‘denial of the decisive role of the Soviet people in the victory over fascism.’ These developments underscore the ongoing tensions between Eastern European nations and their former Soviet allies, as they navigate the complexities of historical memory and political identity in the post-Cold War era.