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Rotterdam-based MVRDV has announced that renovation work has started at the Pyramid of Tirana, an adaptive reuse project in Albanias capital city that will see a monument-museum erected in honor of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist dictator who ruled over the mountainous Balkan nation with a ferocious grip for over four decades, transformed into what MVRDV has called a new hub for Tiranas cultural life and a carrier for the new generation.

Completed in 1988 in the heart of Tirana just three years after Hoxhas death, the Brutalist structure first served as a decidedly eccentric landmark museum honoring Hoxha that was co-designed by his architect daughter, Pranvera Hoxha, and her husband, Klement Kolaneci, along with others.

The tenure of the so-called Enver Hoxha Museum, however, was relatively short-lived as a pyramidal shrine (colloquially referred to as the Enver Hoxha Mausoleum) was shuttered shortly after the fall of communism in Albania in 1991. The 127,000-square-foot monument was then rebranded as the Pyramid of Tirana and in subsequent years has served an eclectic range of proposes, none of them having much permanence: A conference venue, a nightclub, a base for NATO during the 1999 Kosovo War, a media broadcasting center, and a filming location for at least one direct-to-video horror remake. Most recently, the Pyramid, having fallen into a state of disrepair, has served as an unsanctioned (and somewhat perilous) hangout spot for Albanian youths, who have taken it upon themselves to cover the hulking, marble tile-clad structure in graffiti and often climb it at night and thennot without riskslide down its slopes, according to an MVRDV press release.

Climbing up and then sliding down the building seems to have been something of a time-honored tradition for the youth of Tirana. As the current mayor of the city, Erion Veliaj, explained to The Guardian last year in an article detailing the reuse of Hoxha-era structures and sites, he certainly partook in this activity in his younger years: I remember our butts would catch fire sliding down. We all used to have the same corduroy pants and you could see them losing their corduroy ribbing, he said. He also relayed to The Guardian that he personally specified that the reimagined Pyramid should remain climbable. The building represents our transition, he added. Its a metaphorical display of what weve gone through.

Proposed demolish-and-replace schemes have come and gone over the years but none have stuck due largely to pushback from the residents of Tirana, who prefer that the Pyramid remain standing as a reminder, however painful, of the oppressive, isolationist Hoxha regime. (Hoxhas widow, Nexhmije Hoxha, died last year at the age of 99. She remained an unapologetic defender of her late husband and his policies, which included banning all religion and private property and forbidding travel outside of Albanias borders, until her death.)

In 2017, a plan to revitalize and repurpose the structure was formalized, leading to the now-underway MVRDV-lead transformation, a project co-financed by the Albanian central government and the municipality of Tirana with assistance from the Albanian-American Development Foundation. The reborn structures main tenant will be the nonprofit organization TUMO Tirana, which will establish a multifaceted creative technology learning hub and cultural center at the Pyramid and provide free educational courses in software, film, music, robotics, and animation to local teenagers.

The overhaul of the Pyramid, its interior currently hermetically sealed and inaccessible per MVRDV, will be a dramatic one although the buildings concrete shell will be preserved. A multitude of modular boxes containing individual programmatic spaces will be placed inside, upon, and around the existing structure to create a dynamic village composed of classrooms, cafes, and studios according to the firm. The dark and cavernous main interior space will be opened up and converted into a light-filled atrium.

The sloping concrete beams will be, as mentioned, left intact and converted into external staircases so that the public can continue, as specified by Veliaj, to scaleand slide down, on one single beamthe structure, albeit in a safer and more organized fashion. As noted by MVRDV, the external staircases help to preserve the appropriating [of the former dictatorial monument] that began with the citizens of Tirana while transforming the stair-clad building into a venue for open-air events and touristic sightseeing opportunities. On the landscaping front, plans to cloak the largely vegetation-free site with trees and greenery will further boost its appeal as a place for the public to congregate.

Said Winy Maas, founding partner of MVRDV, in a statement:

Working on a brutalist monument like the Pyramid is a dream. It is striking and interesting to see how the country struggled with the future of the building, which on one hand is a controversial chapter in the countrys history, and on the other hand has already been partly reclaimed by the residents of Tirana. I immediately saw its potential, and that it should be possible to make it even more of a peoples monument instead of demolishing it. The challenging part is to create a new relationship between the building and its surroundings. I am confident our design establishes this. I am looking forward to seeing young people and for the first time older people climbing the steps to the rooftop!

The transformation of the Pyramid of Tiranaa project that shows how a building can be made suitable for a new era, while at the same time preserving its complex history, and demonstrates that historic brutalist buildings are ideal for reuse per MVRDVseems to have been warmly received by residents of the city, many of whom have rallied against plans to raze, instead of repurposing, other decrepit but culturally significant structures in the capital. Case in point: Last Mays demolition of the historic National Theatre of Albania (Teatri Kombtar) sparked heatedand at times violentconfrontations between protestors and police and lead to mass arrests. The iconic theater, erected in 1939 during the Italian occupation of Albania, will be replaced with a bowtie-shaped, Bjarke Ingels Group-designed cultural center.

Excerpt from:
Work kicks off at MVRDV's transformation of a communist relic into a new cultural hub for Tirana, Albania - The Architect's Newspaper

YOUR Honour, there are a few things I wish to say. For if what I say here serves even one whit to further dedicate growing millions of Americans to fight for peace, and to repel the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country, I shall consider my rising to speak worthwhile indeed.

Quite candidly, Your Honour, I say these things not with any idea that what I say will influence your sentence of me. For even with all the powers Your Honour holds, how can you decide to mete out justice for the only act to which I proudly plead guilty, and for one, moreover by which your own prior rulings constitute no crime that of being a member and officer of the Communist Party of the United States?

Will you measure, for example, as worthy of one years sentence, my passionate adherence to the idea of fighting for full unequivocal equality for my people, the Negro people, which as a communist, I believe can only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class.

A year for another vital communist belief, that the bestial Korean War is an unjust war?Or my belief that peaceful coexistence of nations can be achieved and peace won if struggled for?

Another year for my belief that only under socialism will exploitation of man by man be finally abolished and the great human and industrial resources of the nation be harnessed for the wellbeing of the people?

Still another years sentence for my belief that the denial of the exercise of free speech and thought to communists only precedes, as history confirms, the denial of the exercise of these rights to all Americans?

These were the opening words of Claudia Joness statement to the court in New York in February 1953.

As a member of the political committee of the Communist Party, she, alongside 10 other leading communists, were being tried in a courtdescribed at the time as the thought control trial held under the infamous provisions of the fascist-like Smith Act before a rigged jury, with framed up testimony provided by paid stool pigeons and professional informers and in an atmosphere of hysteria.

Several years before, 11 leading communists had been tried under similar circumstances and given severe prison sentences.

This period of McCarthyism saw thousands of communists, trade unionists, black activists and others persecuted and imprisoned by a reactionary US government which preached the threat of communism taking over the country to disguise its attack on democracy and civil rights.

As black and red, Jones was one of the main targets of the repressive state machine which for years had tried to deport her as an alien and immigrant.

Shades here of the present British government which is still actively deporting people who originally arrived here as immigrants.

Jones, born in Trinidad in 1915, had arrived in the US aged just eight and over the years had had been continually denied US citizenship because of her politics.

Now the authorities had her in their sights. She was indicted for an article she had written, entitled Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security on the grounds that this had broken bail conditions she was under.

However, the judge refused to allow the article to be read out in court.

Joness response was outstanding. She said: Introduce a page to show Claudia Jones wrote an article during the indictment period, but you dare not even read a line of it, even to a biased jury, on which sat a lone Negro juror, there by accident, since he was an alternate well through most of the trial. You dare not gentlemen of the prosecution, assert that Negro women can think and speak and write.

She continued to denounce racism and declare her pride in being a communist. She ended her statement with these words.

If out of this struggle history assesses that I and my co-defendants have made some small contribution, I shall consider my role small indeed. The glorious exploits of anti-fascist heroes and heroines, honoured today in all lands for their contributions to social progress, will, just like the role of our prosecutors, also be measured by the people of the United States in that coming day.

Imprisoned anddeported to Britain after the trial, Jones is remembered for many accomplishments, not least of which is her historic statement to the court in February 1953.

Her words then and today, where we are seeing growing tensions between nations, the rise of fascism in many parts of the world and continued oppression of people because of their sex and race as well as class remain valid.

February 21 1915 is also Joness birth date, so the Communist Party of Britains Anti-Racist Anti-Fascist Commission plans to celebrate her life with an annual ceremony including an oration beside her grave at Highgate cemetery.

The Communist Party, with broad participation from our friends and allies in the community and abroad, aims to arrange the first commemoration in February 2022 when we all hope the Covid pandemic which has taken so many lives especially from the most vulnerable, the poorest, the oldest and black and Asian people is over.

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The words of Claudia Jones words still resonate today - Morning Star Online

From the New York Times obituary for Walter Bernstein (no relation), a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, has this to say about his ties to the Communist Party, USA:

"I didn't join the party until after the war," Mr. Bernstein said, although the events of the '30s, including the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, made the Communist cause attractive to him. "The Communists," he said, "seemed like they were doing something.".

Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name had appeared in "Red Channels," an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by the right-wing journal Counterattack.

"I was listed right after Lenny Bernstein," Mr. Bernstein recalled. "There were about eight listings for me, and they were all true." He had indeed written for the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights.

If I had read this without knowing Bernstein's biography, I would have been led to believe that Bernstein joined the became interested in the Communist Party in the 1930s [he in fact joined the Young Communist League, the Party's youth wing, in 1937] because of despair over the Depression and concern about fascism. He was later punished for having once belonged to the Party, as well as his support for the leftists in Spain and for civil rights.

In fact, Bernstein was a member of the American Communist Party and remained so until 1956. In other words, he remained a[n affiliate and then] member of the Soviet-controlled and overtly pro-Soviet CPUSA through Stalin's pact with Hitler, through the antisemitic post-World War II purges, through the Soviet domination of Eastern Europethrough the point where any reasonable person would have been aware of Stalin's crimes.

[UPDATE from Prof. Harvey Klehr, an expert on American Communism:

Some additional details that reveal both the Times inability to ever get a story about American communists right and Bernstein's own mendacity. Bernstein admitted in his autobiography that he joined the Young Communist League in 1937;claiming he joined the Party after WWII was not entirely honest. And, in the Venona decryptions, there is a 1944 message wherein the New York station of the KGB reported that he had met with "Khan," likely Avrom Landy, an American communist who acted as a liaison with the KGB. Bernstein, whose name is given in plain text- no code name- "welcomed the re-establishment of liaison with him and promised to write a report on his trip by the first of November." The trip was quite probably a journey to Yugoslavia while a correspondent for Yank, during which Bernstein became the first Western newsman to obtain an interview with Josip Tito. In his autobiography Bernstein admitted that the interview was an act of subversion, "against American policy in Yugoslavia." And, he claimed that a Soviet diplomatic official asked him about the trip but he refused to answer his questions. But he admitted speaking to Landry!]

As I've written elsewhere:

When the blacklist was started, Joseph Stalin, one of the great mass murderers in human history, controlled the Soviet Union, a totalitarian, repressive, imperialist nation that was involved in a Cold War with the United States. As we have seen, hardcore CPUSA members were as a rule loyal to this dictatorship and not the United States,and screenwriters were obligated to try to use their positions to promote Communism.

[M]ost of those blacklisted were at least as morally complicit in Stalinist crimes100 as a typical American Nazi of the 1930s and 40s was complicit in Nazi crimes. Communist screenwriters, in particular, "defended the Stalinist regime, accepted the Comintern's policies and about-faces and criticized enemies and allies alike with infuriating selfrighteousness . screen artist reds became apologists for crimes of monstrous dimensions. film Reds in particular never displayed any independence of mind or organization vis-a-vis the Comintern and the Soviet Union." Nor was the screenwriters' Communist activism irrelevant to their jobs, as they actively sought to maximize Communist and pro-Soviet sentiment in films, and minimize the opposite. Screenwriter and leading Communist John Howard Lawson urged his comrades to "get five minutes of Party doctrine into every film, and to place such moments in expensive scenes so that they would not be cut by the producer."

One can certainly debate whether, in the absence of criminal liability, being a Soviet stooge during Stalin's reign merited blacklisting. One cannot argue, however, that Soviet stooges were not Soviet stooges, but that seems to have become the default assertion about blacklisted Hollywood writers among the cultural elite.

[Update: I'm getting feedback that the Hollywood blacklist mostly caught up people with left-wing politics who were not involved in Communism. This is a myth, as discussed here: "According to Ronald Radosh, co-author of Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left (2005), and an expert on American Communism, not only were all of the Hollywood Ten members of the CPUSA at the time they were blacklisted, so were approximately 98 per cent of all of the Hollywood blacklist's targets."]

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (the Jewish media's equivalent of the AP) does the Times one better:

Walter Bernstein, a proudly "secular" Jewish screenwriter best known for his 1960s and '70s dramas and for being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, has died at 101.

Bernstein, born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, called himself a "secular, self-loving Jew of a leftist persuasion," according to the Times.

That persuasion got him labeled as a communist sympathizer in the 1950s, when the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee cracked down on leftist attitudes in Hollywood.

Quite obviously, what got him labeled as a "communist sympathizer" was that he was a member of the Communist Party USA. As for being a self-loving Jew, I can't speak to his later sentiments, but any Jew who continued to support Stalin through his murder of leading Jewish cultural figures and the "Doctors' Plot" isn't at the top of my list for a B'nai B'rith award.

The way domestic pro-Soviet Communism is treated in popular culture, as if it was a figment of the right-wing imagination (as suggested by the term "witch hunts" and Arthur Miller's play on that topic) is bizarre. In addition to the persistent insistence that actual members of the CPUSA like Bernstein were either never Communists or just had a brief dalliance with Communism, we have the consistent attribution of JFK's murder by Lee Harvey Oswald, who by then had graduated from pro-Soviet to pro-Cuban Communism, to vague right-wing forces. We also have the remarkable heroine status of Angela Davis (she stars, for example, in Ibram Kendi's work), despite her long history as a shill for the USSR and East Germany. (She is pictured below with East Germany's dictator Erich Honecker. She remained an active member of the CPUSA until its collapse in 1991.)

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The New York Times and American Communism - Reason

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If you asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau whether Xi was a communist, he wouldnt admit it

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If youre wondering what it would take for the Trudeau administration to get over its crush on Chinese communism, I have no idea. Especially once we learned that despite everything, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) is doing its best to pour our industrial secrets into the Politburos pockets via wait for it Huawei. And by despite everything I mean massive evidence of the Chinese Communist Partys hostility to human rights and decency, including putting historys worst mass killer on their banknotes in case anyone was struggling with the concept of brutal communist dictatorship and loving it.

Periodically I get heckled for saying Trudeau administration not Trudeau government. But I cling to the quaint non-Xi Jinping concept of a separation of powers rather than a centrally directed, unified force for social change that can turn on a dime. And Im glad that some within our state apparatus agree.

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David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), recently warned against Beijings strategy for geopolitical advantage on all fronts economic, technological, political and military that uses all elements of state power to carry out activities that are a direct threat to our national security and sovereignty. Back in November the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) fingered China as a leading cyber-menace. And CSIS and the CSE are part of our government.

So too, unfortunately, is NSERC, which is currently trading our know-how for renminbi. Something major American and British universities now refuse to do, while Australians grow uneasy. Not us, apparently.

My colleague Kelly McParland, quoting Vigneault, asked in exasperation, You have to wonder how often knowledgeable people need to attest that Chinas is a dangerous, predatory and untrustworthy government before the fact of it begins to sink in and action is taken. Instead the Trudeau administration pussyfoots around genocide (whats an exterminated minority between trading partners, plus Uighur is hard to pronounce), plays Olympic dodgeball and flirts with Huawei.

As you may know, I dont believe in conspiracy theories. I think they poison public discourse and am forever trying to explain to people that when someone says stuff you dont agree with and does stuff you dont agree with its because they think stuff you dont agree with. But the Chinese Communist plan for world conquest isnt a plot. Its a plan.

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Chinese officials dont go out of their way to advertise it when trying to wheedle something out of you. But see Document No. 9, a.k.a., the Communiqu on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere, which was issued in 2012 with Chinese President Xi Jinpings backing.

It denounces seven things: constitutional democracy, including separation of powers, elections and an independent judiciary; universal values like Western human rights applying to China; civil society, as in anyone doing anything except through the Communist party; free markets; an independent press; historical nihilism, i.e., criticizing Mao Zedong for being an insane mass murderer; and questioning Chinese-style socialism, i.e., criticizing Xi for being one.

For opposing conspiracy theories I get called many names, including co-conspirator. But not useful idiot. They leave off the useful. Unlike Chinas leaders when it comes to Western politicians who give them a free pass, such as outgoing Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil, who recently echoed Document No. 9 Point 3 in a Canada China Business Council video.

Its not our role to go in and tell someone else theyre wrong, he said. Im proud to be a Canadian, but Chinese people are proud to be Chinese. And they have a way of doing things. Lets go learn. And let us grow economic ties. Never mind that they crush Hong Kong and commit mass slaughter. After all, Hitler and Stalin had a way they did things, too. And the Chinese way includes lucrative consultancies and senior advisor posts.

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The Politburo understands all too well that conceited people think arrangements that flatter and favour them represent the universe unfolding as it should. And its easy and comforting to ignore threats. Back in the Cold War, people were forever insisting Leonid Brezhnev or Stalin werent communists. Sure, they claimed to be, and imposed communism aggressively wherever possible. But deep down they wanted peace, power, security or any dang thing you could name except communism. Like our Chinese buds.

Unfortunately, Xi Jinping is as communist as Lenin or Mao. General secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Commanding its immense private army and flying a red flag with five yellow stars. Need I go on?

Apparently so. Because if you asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau whether Xi was a communist, he wouldnt admit it. He isnt given to answering even innocent questions, let alone awkward ones. And Im not saying they have something on him. Hes a fool on national security, as on economics, our constitutional order and practically anything else you can think of.

Even so, this wilful blindness and misconduct is amazing. If he wont stop it, we must.

National Post

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John Robson: Trudeau's 'wilful blindness' to the evils of Chinese communism - National Post

To prove to you why communism is so bad, were going to talk to my dad who grew up in communist Romania, TikToker @stinkysocialist says, in a video thats amassed 2.4m likes. Walking into their dads study, they ask: Dad, why was communist Romania so bad? The dad, serious, thoughtful and poignant, begins: I lived there until I was 21 years old, so I have a lot of horrible stories to tell you. I left communist Romania in 88, which was one year before the war went down. And if I were to tell you one main thing that I remember? I aint never seen two pretty best friends.

Scroll through TikTok and youll find a lot of videos like this that ostensibly touch upon the legacy of the Soviet Union, before flipping the script. The Daddy Karl trend back in October 2020 was a signal of how quickly TikToks communist community was growing. Four months on, #communism has reached over 563 million views and accumulated hours of videos dedicated to highlighting Gen Zs seemingly growing anti-capitalist beliefs, and their faith in opposing ideologies.

Youll find people flexing tattoos of the hammer and sickle symbol (originally created by Soviet artist Yevgeny Ivanovich Kamzolkin to represent unity between the working class and the peasantry) to the soundtrack Just Did a Good Thing. Another video sees the face of Joseph Stalin, the notorious leader of the USSR from 1922-1952, whose legacy is caught somewhere between mass murderer and World War Two hero, deepfaked to lipsync to Millie Bs M to the B. One TikTok is captioned communist leaders as chav anthems (Stalin is Sophie Aspins Mash Up, for those interested).

The influx of iconic Soviet symbols hanging on TikTokers bedroom walls or printed on their bikini tops, and videos claiming the USSR is best over a Soviet chorus soundtrack not to mention the numerous light-hearted tattoos and animations may seem like little more than another TikTok trend. For some, it does appear to be more of an aesthetic interest than a deeply political one. But for many others who place the hammer and sickle in their social media bio, or label themselves commies or comrades, its a belief; an important part of their identity.

20-year-old Ilyssa, from New York, sees communism as the only viable alternative, one that will improve the societal issues we currently face. From a young age, I was very aware of the stark class differences that existed, she says. I grew up with a single mother in a very poor family. We made it work but I was aware of our class status. On TikTok, she educates her 67k followers on the subject of anti-semitism and creates hammer and sickle-inspired makeup looks. For Ilyssa, the symbol means solidarity among the working class. [Communism] means being anti-capitalist. It means advocating for equality and dignity for all people and striving towards a basic level of humanity for every person that exists.

Yet it's hard to ignore the geographical and historical disconnect between young Americans with a new interest in this history, and those related, through experience or blood, to hardships under Soviet rule. Alina, an 18-year-old from Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine, wonders if TikToks communist boom is rooted in people who are fans of communism, but who understand little about its history.

In Russia and former Soviet satellite states, such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, the Soviet symbol and images of the regimes leaders still carry the trauma of that time. For the children and grandchildren of those who suffered, the hammer and sickle represents much more than the solidarity initially intended. Stalins regime will be remembered by its descendants for decades to come, 18-year-old Anton from Omsk, Russia says. They will not forget the deaths of their repressed relatives.

The Red Armys arrival is rarely remembered as a pure liberation, historian Anne Applebaum wrote about the USSRs victory over the Nazis in her book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. Instead, it is remembered as the brutal beginning of a new occupation.

Many of the descendants of the regime know Soviet rule for its horrors. There was the looting and rape by Red Army soldiers, as documented by writers like Vasily Grossman; the Gulag system that led to the deaths of tens of millions of inmates; and the criminalisation of homosexuality in 1934 that targeted an unknown but substantial number of gay men and women -- a subject Dan Healey explores in his book Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi.

The flag of the Soviet Union may trigger memories of events like the Holodomor in Ukraine a famine widely considered to be a genocide that led to the deaths of up to 12 million Ukrainians. To some, its a symbol that represented the anti-Semitism that was characteristic of Stalins regime, such as the 1953 Doctors Plot, a witch-hunt that targeted predominantly Jewish doctors. For others, its a reminder of the 1921 invasion of Georgia, which aimed to rid the country of its independence and implement Bolshevik control, or the Great Terror/Purge of 1936-1938 that targeted everyone from ethnic minorities to those suspected of dissidence.

Its not just the ideologys dark history that Anton worries is being ignored, but its problematic present. The current situation in North Korea is an example, he says. The communists know what is going on there but either dont think its necessary to talk about, or they discuss it ambiguously.

There are a lot of TikTok videos under #communism that set out to show that true communism has never been properly implemented. One video says the Stalinism and Soviet communism legacy distorted so many peoples understanding of Marxism and socialism. They are different ideologies. For the communists of TikTok, oppressive regimes like that of Stalin, North Korea, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia have very little to do with what communism and the hammer and sickle mean today.

I dont necessarily agree that its offensive, says 18-year-old Zoe from Chicago, who has a tattoo of the symbol and uses her TikTok platform to educate others about communism. I dont think that we should equate communism with the Soviet Union. We associate the symbol with more radical, positive change. That desire for change was what pushed her into far left and anti-capitalist politics in the first place. It was mostly the events happening in the US, especially over the summer, that were the reason I decided that communism was the best fit for me, she says. And there are many others, both Gen Z and millennials, that are also starting to consider communism or socialism as a more suitable ideological fit.

A 2019 YouGov poll found that more than one third of millennials in the US approve of communism an 8% increase on the previous year. Elsewhere, predictions of the current presidential election in Ecuador are indicating a nation eager for a return to socialism after years of neoliberal rule under current leader Lenn Moreno. In Russia, only over the past few months has the seemingly progressive, socialist and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny (who has a history of racist and nationalist politics) overtaken Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who has called for the Re-Stalinisation of Russian Society. Now, Navalny is seen as the substantial political opposition to Vladimir Putin.As such, he has recently been imprisoned for violating parole terms, during a period of time spent comatose in a Berlin hospital as he recovered from novichok poisoning.

The semantics of these debates are complicated, not least because while many advocating for communist ideals are based far from the former USSR, they arent necessarily disconnected from its history. Ilyssa recounts the hardships that her Jewish relatives felt when fleeing Russia from the pogroms in the early 20th century, and then from the Soviet Union a few decades later. My great grandparents were able to flee and come to the US, but a lot of their relatives were killed, and theres no documentation that exists of them outside of their memories, she explains. As a history major and descendant of victims of the Soviet Unions regime, Ilyssa wants to reclaim the hammer and sickle as a symbol of hope and a brighter future. But thats not to say that she doesnt recognise the dark nuances of the flag from which her great grandparents fled. Its realising that [Stalin] was not representative of communism or the hammer and sickle thats what makes it so easy to divorce the two. But its still worth learning from. We have to look at what parts of Marxism and communist theory left a space for totalitarianism and authoritarianism to take hold, and how we can prevent that from happening in the future.

Many young Russians also want to see the crimes of Stalin dissociated from the countrys proud heritage. The symbol isnt offensive," Roma, from Sarapul in Western Russia, says. It represents pride, a time when people strove for the best. Over 800 miles away in Saint Petersburg, 22-year-old Maria says she thinks its a good thing that Gen Z communists are breathing new life into the symbol: I personally dont associate it with anything bad. The hammer and sickle was there before Stalin and it was there after him. His crimes are a black stain on our history that still resonates to this day.

For many of Gen Zs TikTok communist community, rejuvenating the hammer and sickle is not about ignoring the weight that it carries. Its about returning the symbol to its original meaning: one of unity and solidarity. They want the symbol to represent everything they dream of seeing in the world. But, above all, they see it as an emblem of hope for a generation caught within a defective, splintering system; one they collectively want to topple on its head.

Follow i-D on Instagram and TikTok for more.

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How TikTok communists are reclaiming the hammer and sickle - i-D