A Gallup poll conducted in August 2025 found that 66% of Democrats view socialism favorably, while only 42% 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-NY), and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have built careers on the promise of “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 am going to tell them about my grandfather, my father, and myself. Three generations. One system. One verdict.
The night of Feb. 25, 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. The book lay open beside him in his bed.
SPAIN IS NO LONGER A DEMOCRACY
At 2 in the morning, soldiers of the NKVD — the Soviet secret police — stood over the family in the darkness. The order was simple: dress quickly, make no sound, come with us. 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 — as if a schoolboy’s grammar book confirmed the treason they already believed.
The family was loaded onto cattle wagons. Soldiers beat people with rifle butts as they forced them inside — children, women, elderly men, and the visibly pregnant Ekaterine. 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, 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. At the end of it, the wagons stopped on an open steppe, and the people were told: This is your new home. A flat, empty field. No shelter. No explanation.
The reproach of excellence
My grandfather, Vakhtang Gelashvili, was the chief engineer of the local tractor station — the most skilled man in his region. Locals said he could pull a stalled tractor with his bare hands. They called him “the Forest Man” for his size and strength. He had built his own house from basalt stone. Workers respected him. The party could not forgive any of it.
Drafted in 1941, his unarmed transport was captured by German forces. He survived Stalag 352 near Minsk, where over 100,000 prisoners died. A German general, fascinated by his size, forced him to wrestle a decorated champion. Vakhtang won so decisively that guards prepared to shoot him on the spot. The general intervened and saved his life.
On Feb. 17, 1942, Vakhtang organized 15 prisoners and escaped into the Belarusian forests. He joined the partisans and fought the Nazis until the war ended. He came home alive.
A man who could not be broken by the Germans could not be tolerated by the Soviets. Local Communist Party officials put his name on a deportation list with two accusations: “former prisoner of war,” and “kulak” — a political label Soviet authorities used against independent farmers, property owners, and successful citizens. A man who built things, fixed things, led things — that was enough to make him an enemy.
Not a trial. Not evidence. Not a hearing. Two words written beside a man’s name, and the machinery moved.
The steppe
On the open steppe of Kazakhstan, Vakhtang and the heavily pregnant Ekaterine dug a pit in the earth and lived in it. Guards on horseback drove the “special settlers” to work with whips. Children labored alongside adults. Many died of starvation and disease.
In 1953, after Josef Stalin’s death, two young Georgian colonels arrived in the camp. Of the 14 wagons that had left Georgia in 1951, only two wagons’ worth of families were told their deportation had been an error. My family was among them. Both colonels wept as they embraced the freed families.
Years later, when I was vetted for the Ministry of State Security, I read the document from Moscow on my grandfather myself: “Fully exonerated. All charges groundless.”
That piece of paper did not restore the years stolen from my family. It did not restore their property. It did not restore their health. It did not restore their lives.
Neighbors had taken their furniture, dishes, and carpets. Vakhtang rebuilt what he could — but at 46, his heart gave out. The system had kept the account.
Three generations. One verdict.
My father, Shota, came home from Kazakhstan two years behind in school, with nothing to his name and a stigma that never fully disappeared. He refused to join the Communist Party. He educated himself, rose through skill alone, and became director of a wine factory. He was the kind of man who fixed problems others walked away from and earned the trust of everyone who worked with him. The party tried twice to destroy him with fabricated charges. He survived both times — but survived them the way survivors do: diminished, watchful, never entirely free.
In secret, he listened to Radio Free Europe. Under Soviet law, this was a crime.
I was born in 1972. I served in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs. I served as a Member of Parliament. In 2010, Georgian intelligence obtained a GRU document — Russian military intelligence — listing officials marked for physical elimination. I was third on that list. In 2012, I fled Georgia. I am writing this from San Francisco.
My grandfather was deported. My father was persecuted. I was forced into exile. Three generations. One system. One verdict.
What Bernie Sanders saw and what my father knew
In 1988 — the same year my father was secretly listening to Radio Free Europe — 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.
My father knew what was being hidden. He had lived through it.
The Gallup poll does not ask respondents to define socialism. It asks only whether their impression is positive or negative. Most Americans associate the word with equality and government services — not with deportation lists, sealed cattle wagons, or children hauling earth until they die of heat.
HOW DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA ARE RESHAPING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FROM THE INSIDE
Every socialist system my family experienced ultimately depended on force, coercion, and political repression, regardless of the adjectives used to describe it. It is not a policy. It is not Scandinavia. It is a machine with one consistent function: it destroys anyone sufficiently capable, principled, or stubborn enough to threaten those who operate it. It does this legally, bureaucratically, and when necessary, with a rifle.
Before you carry that flag, before you cast that vote, before you cheer that candidate, I ask one thing: know what is behind it. My family paid for that knowledge with deportation, persecution, exile, and death. The least you can do is learn that history before you celebrate the ideology that produced it.
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.