Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Few themes are as likely to divide a room as this one. Someone’s grandparents may have built a revolution; someone else’s may have fled one. The same society that ran a literacy campaign also ran a labor camp. This lens refuses the two easy stories, the socialist paradise and the totalitarian nightmare, and starts instead from testimony that holds the contradictions together. The point is not to reach a verdict but to hear what living through these societies actually felt like, from people on every side of it.
Anchor questions
Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room, and expect strong feeling. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.
- What were you taught about “communist countries,” by whom, and in what setting?
- If you have lived in or visited one of these states, what surprised you?
- Does anyone in your family carry a story of these societies, of gratitude, of loss, or both?
- Have you relied on something one of these states is known for, free healthcare, education, housing? What would its absence mean?
- Have you feared or fled a state that called itself socialist? What did it do?
- What do you want to know that the usual stories never told you?
Materials that may help
Experiential work begins from the room, and this theme’s room often holds the history directly. These materials extend that testimony, deliberately from opposing sides. All are free unless marked otherwise.
Testimony from the Soviet world
- Svetlana Alexievich (b. 1948), Secondhand Time (2013). Assembled testimony of ordinary people living through the Soviet collapse, holding pride, loss, terror, and longing together. The single best balanced source for the lens. No borrowable English copy exists. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com. Her Nobel lecture, delivered as the book was being finished, is free and assignable: nobelprize.org
- Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899 to 1980), Hope Against Hope (1970). The poet’s widow on his arrest and death in the Great Purge. The necessary weight on the critical side. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Reimagining Soviet Georgia (2020 to present). Oral histories of daily life and post-socialism in the South Caucasus, holding gains and losses together. Free: podcasts.apple.com
- Working Class History (2018 to present). First-hand testimony from ordinary people, including inside state-socialist societies. Free: workingclasshistory.com
China, from inside
- Neale Hunter, Shanghai Journal (1969). An Australian teacher in Shanghai through the January Storm of 1967, watching workers take the city. Written close to the events and broadly sympathetic, which is exactly why it is worth reading beside the memoirs written after the disillusion arrived: it records what it felt like while people still believed it. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Ma Bo (b. 1947), Blood Red Sunset (1995). A Red Guard sent to Inner Mongolia who believed, and then did not. On what the movement did to the people inside it as well as to the people it was aimed at, by someone who did the aiming. Free to borrow: archive.org
Vietnam after the victory
The theme covers the war and stops. These are the people who won it and then had to live in what came next.
- Truong Nhu Tang, A Vietcong Memoir (1985). A founder of the National Liberation Front and Justice Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, who watched Hanoi dissolve the southern revolution he had spent his life building, and left by boat. He never recants the war against the Americans, and that is what makes his account of the aftermath so hard to wave away as an exile’s grievance. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Doan Van Toai, The Vietnamese Gulag (1986). A student organizer against the Saigon regime, jailed after 1975 by the side he had campaigned for. Free to borrow: archive.org
- Tran Tri Vu, Lost Years (1988). Four and a half years in the reeducation camps, day by day, published by Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies rather than a trade press. Free to borrow: archive.org
Inside the Asian and Eastern socialist states
- A State of Mind (Daniel Gordon, 2004, 93 min). Two young North Korean gymnasts and their families, observational and non-judgmental. A rare look at ordinary DPRK life. Free with ads: watch.plex.tv
- “North Koreans tell BBC they are stuck and waiting to die” (BBC, 2023). Roughly 22 minutes, about 6.7 million views. Rare recent testimony on hunger and fear, the mainstream-critical counterweight to the film above. youtube.com/watch?v=SiviOdWDl9o
- Sea of Memory (2011, 25 min). The testimony of the Vietnamese boat people who fled after 1975, the voices of those the revolution drove out. youtube.com/watch?v=YNe897ereaY
- The Death of Yugoslavia (BBC, 1995, 287 min). The protagonists narrate the collapse of Yugoslav socialism into war, first-person and unsparing. youtube.com/watch?v=bVUg-VoPAeA
A note on method
This is the theme where a facilitator most needs to protect the room. People arrive with inherited loyalties and inherited wounds, and a session can slide into a shouting match between “you’re defending dictators” and “you’re repeating cold-war propaganda.” Name that risk out loud at the start. Insist that a literacy campaign and a labor camp can both be true, that an exile’s grief and a worker’s gratitude are both knowledge, and that the goal is to understand what happened, not to win. Testimony from every side has standing here.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially testimony from Chinese workers and peasants rather than students, teachers, and Red Guards: the China voices here are educated and urban, which is a real slant. Testimony from Laos and from Central Asia is absent entirely.