I am not conflating Nazis and communists. I am comparing you to a Holocaust denier because of your conspiracy theories about the existence of these places established to educate people about the well documented atrocities of the communist states. I didn’t say they were as bad as the Nazis overall, I pointed out they happily used the cramped cells, torture implements, and kill rooms left behind.

It is very much not the exception in communism. I have been to almost every former Warsaw pact country and a few countries that were part of the USSR and these museums are universal.

Your do a great disservice to the tens-of-thousands of victims of the communist states. I spent a lot of time in these places, looking at mugshots and intake forms and reading about what happened to them.

What do you think when you hear about a fascist antisemite standing in front of a pile of children’s shoes in a Holocaust museum saying “it didn’t happen”? Because that’s what I think about you right now.

And I never said concentration camps (edit: although these museums do tell the stories of the tens-of-thousands “deported” to camps in Siberia and other places), I was taking about buildings used for the imprisonment, torture, and murder of mostly political prisoners, but also others that upset the Nazis/communists in some way. Here is one example of many. https://www.terrorhaza.hu/en

So they just built all those museums dedicated to the hardship and terror of those years as a little joke to mess with westerners like me as I traveled through their countries?

Interesting side fact, in places that were occupied by both sides in WW2, some museums could do double duty. The places the Gestapo used to imprison, torture, and murder were often the same places the communists used for the same purposes.

A ten year old poll, that happened before some important recent events, and is mostly from Russian client states in central Asia and the Caucasus because it only encompasses countries that were part of the Soviet Union is disingenuous, at best, in response to this post about eastern Europe.

Try that poll again today in Albania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Balkans. See how that goes.

Edit: I don’t know how I overlooked the Baltics, I was just in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia for a few weeks this spring. If the museums are anything to go by, their responses to this question would definitely contradict your narrative and they were part of the USSR.