Communist rule froze older historical attitudes that reemerged after collapse

Evidence

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere brought an­ other historiographic problem. It soon became clear that Communist rule had acted as a kind of deep-freeze, in which historical notions and ideas and attitudes were frozen stiff and then, with the ending of the Communist controls, thawed out. In Russia they thawed out in 1917, with many of the attitudes and anxieties of that era. The Yugoslav peoples thawed out, roughly, into 1945, with the attitudes, the memories, the prejudices, and the hostilities of that year fresh as they were at the moment when they were frozen. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1817

Categorization

• XREF: A vivid mechanism metaphor (‘deep-freeze’ / dates thawing out) for how regimes layer historical memory — speaks to how eras get culturally ‘frozen’ and later resurface, parallel to Said-adjacent work on how colonial-era categories persist into present representation. — connects to: Czech communists preserved old leaders despite claiming reformist transformation — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 460