A Gallup poll conducted in August 2025 found that 66 percent of Democrats view socialism favorably. Only 42 percent of those same Democrats viewed capitalism favorably.
At protests across American cities, demonstrators have carried Soviet flags, the hammer and sickle on red cloth, as symbols of resistance. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have built careers on the promise of what they call “democratic socialism,” drawing crowds of young Americans who see that word not as a warning but as a hope.
I am not going to answer them with statistics or economic theory. I will instead tell them my family’s story.
In February 1951, in the village of Bebnisi, in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, 14-year-old Shota Gelashvili had fallen asleep over his German language textbook. He had a test the next morning at Bebnisi Secondary School. The book lay open beside him in his bed.
At 2 a.m., soldiers of the Soviet secret police burst into his house. They told him, his father, his two sisters, his visibly pregnant mother and his 100-year-old grandmother to dress quickly, make no sound, and come with them. There was no time to gather belongings. The soldiers searched the room and pulled Shota’s German textbook from his bed. They passed it from hand to hand, then gave it to the commanding officer. They acted as if a schoolboy’s grammar book confirmed what they already believed.
The family was loaded onto a cattle car with hundreds of others. Many people were beaten with rifle butts. For three days, the train did not move while more families arrived from villages across Georgia. Inside the sealed wagons, people hung clothing across one corner to create a makeshift toilet. A young man, maddened by thirst, at one point jumped from his wagon to reach water from a stream — soldiers shot him on the spot.
For the entire four-week journey to Kazakhstan, the train stopped only twice to allow prisoners near water. Even then, only two people per family were permitted to leave the car.
Finally, the wagons stopped on an open steppe and the people were told: “This is your new home.” It was a flat, empty field — no shelter, no explanation.
Why was my entire family deported? Mainly because my grandfather had been captured by the Germans during World War II. It did not matter that he had escaped from the camp, joined the partisans and fought the Nazis until the war ended. In fact, that worked against him.
It was bad enough that he had surrendered in war. Many, many Soviet soldiers were captured at the war’s beginning due to the leadership of Stalin’s incompetent generals, and many were sent to prison camps for it after they returned. But local Communist Party officials resented my grandfather all the more for showing traits of initiative and leadership in his escape. They put his name on a deportation list with two accusations: “former prisoner of war,” and “kulak” — Russian socialists’ word for “middle class.”
In Kazakhstan, my family had to dig and live in a dugout in the earth. Guards on horseback drove all of the “special settlers” to work with whips. Children, who were made to labor alongside adults, were occasionally shot while scavenging for food. Torture was commonplace for anyone showing attitude, and Shota experienced it more than once. Many died of starvation and disease.
Two years later, after Stalin’s death, two young Georgian colonels arrived in the camp. Of the fourteen wagons that had left Georgia in 1951, only two train wagons’ worth of families were being returned, told their deportation had been in error — my family among them.
Years later, when I was vetted for Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, the document from Moscow on my grandfather read: “Fully exonerated. All charges groundless.” I read it myself. But our family’s stigma as class enemies did not disappear with a piece of paper. When the family returned to Bebnisi, Shota and his sisters were two years behind in school. Neighbors had taken their furniture, dishes, and carpets. My grandfather rebuilt what he could, but at 46 his heart gave out.
I am Shota Gelashvili’s son. Born in 1972, I grew up knowing exactly what socialism is. My father made sure I knew, because he had watched it destroy his own father and strip him of his livelihood. He survived deportation, Soviet courts and decades of persecution.
The Gallup poll did not ask its respondents to define socialism. It asked only whether their impression is positive or negative. Most Americans associate the word “socialism” with equality and government services — not with deportation lists, sealed cattle wagons, or children hauling earth until they die of heat.
But socialism, in practice, does not work without force and brutality, even if you give it nice adjectives like “democratic.” Socialism is not really a policy or an economic system. It is not Scandinavia. It is a machine whose only function is to destroy anyone sufficiently capable, principled or stubborn enough to threaten those who operate it. It does this legally, bureaucratically and, when necessary, with bullets.
And even when socialism finally and thankfully disappears, it has a distinctive habit of leaving behind impoverished, authoritarian basket-case countries with decades of problems to sort out.
In 1988, the same year my father was secretly listening to Radio Free Europe (Soviet law classified this as a crime), Bernie Sanders sat bare-chested in a Soviet banya, wrapped only in a towel, singing with his Soviet hosts over vodka toasts. He later called it “a very strange honeymoon.” His hosts knew exactly what to show him and what to hide from him.
My father knew what was being hidden. He had lived inside it.
Before you carry that flag or cast that vote for socialism, I ask only that you learn what is behind it. My family paid for that knowledge with their bodies, their decades, their country and their lives.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former member of the Georgian Parliament (2008-2012) and former senior official in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs. He is co-founder of SU & EG LLC, a California-based importer of traditional Georgian wines.
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