I understand there would be widespread disillusionment and disbelief in Soviet communism with the stagnation and repression in the 1980s. I get that communism would also be associated with foreign domination in much of Eastern Europe and central Asia.
Yet it's still hard to grasp that, in nations like Germany, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, that had communist governments that pushed communist ideals for some fifty years, there did not seem to be any significant or influential communist groups in the immediate post-cold war
The sole exception I can think of is Zyuganov in Russia, and even he barely captured a fourth of the nation's votes. And in the SSR that benefited most from communism too!
For example, in the 1990 parliamentary elections the KPD in Germany got.... 1,200 votes. Sure them losing is expected, but that's a dramatic difference from total control of the nation!
I had read once that, in the aftermath of WW2, denazification took decades to take root, and that for the generation that were schoolchildren under Hitler it never truly succeeded and pro-Nazi sentiment remained quite strong in this cohort.
So why didn't this occur with schoolchildren growing up under Marxist doctrine? Why was disillusionment so total?
I can really only speak to the case of Romania, but it's worth remembering that while the Communists certainly engaged in extensive political indoctrination, the people living under communism were acutely aware of its shortcomings. This was particularly true in Romania, where the economy had been in dire straits for most of the decade leading up to 1989 due to Ceausescu's ill-fated effort to erase Romania's national debt through exporting goods, and because of his austerity program, people were doing without basic consumer products like toilet paper (prompting a few hilarious, but unrepeatable jokes). Many people were going hungry, and Romania had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe at the time. So, in other words, people knew what they were being told was a lie, but they were scared into silence by the repressive apparatus of the state, the Securitate, which was the largest secret police force (relative to population) in the Eastern Bloc. Still, there had already been a few cases of unrest in major cities during the 1980s (most notably in Brasov in 1987) prior to the events of December 1989 that led to the overthrow of Ceausescu. The degree to which people were unhappy with Romanian communism was pretty well illustrated by the violence of the Romanian Revolution (it was the only country to violently overthrow its government and execute its leaders).
As for the Communists themselves, many of them didn't go anywhere; they simply rebranded and migrated into the post-Communist political parties. In Romania's case, the post-Ceausescu government was led by a party called the National Salvation Front, which was made up mostly of former Communists, including Ion Iliescu, who became the first president of post-Communist Romania. The first three presidents after 1989 (Iliescu, Emil Constantinescu, and Traian Basescu) were all former members of the Romanian Communist Party; Romania's first non-ex-Communist president wasn't elected until 2014. The Communist Party itself dissolved, and its direct successors were mostly small splinter groups that remained on the margins of Romanian politics. Much easier to rebrand yourself than rebuild the party everyone hated.
As I said, I can really only speak to Romania, which is a somewhat unique case given Ceausescu's "independent" line and adherence to hardline Stalinist principles even when other Eastern Bloc countries were undertaking some liberalizing reforms. It was probably the most extreme case of deprivation and repression, so it's important to contextualize it. Still, it demonstrates pretty clearly that the people were more than ready to move on from Communism, even if they couldn't get rid of the politicians themselves.
Source: Vladimir Tismaneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (U of California Press, 2003)
For more on what happened to the Communist Party in Russia, you might want to check out this answer I wrote.
As an addendum to that answer - in much of the former Soviet Union, the former Communist Party members were (and often are) still in charge of the national and local government, as well as businesses. Nursultan Nazarbayev, who just retired from being President of Kazakhstan in 2019 (and is still in control behind the scenes of the government and of the ruling party) was not only a Communist Party member, but first secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR and even a member of the Soviet Politburo.
What happened in the former USSR is that ruling power was purposefully decoupled from the party and redirected to government institutions under Gorbachev's reforms - you no longer needed to chair a party committee to have effective power, you could be elected governor or president. A lot of people who had ideological opposition to communism left the party, and a lot of people who didn't particularly care one way or another (Vladimir Putin comes to mind) also left once they saw that the Communist Party was essentially a sinking ship that had no career prospects. In the USSR's case the party was effectively banned and had its vast properties confiscated after the August 1991 coup attempt, so pretty much whoever was left to rebuilt the party after that were the true believers.
But the former party members were still around in abundance, often in the same jobs. Turkmenistan is probably the most extreme example, where the Communist Party of the Turkmen SSR renamed itself the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan and essentially carried on as usual as a one-party state, but even in Russia the legislature the RSFSR, with its 86% of representatives elected in 1990 from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, carried on as the legislature of the Russian Federation with its same membership until it got into protracted constitutional conflict with President Yeltsin, resulting in its violent overthrow and the shelling of the legislature in October 1993. By that point the membership had sorted themselves into numerous legislative fractions with only a minority claiming membership as Communists or the associated Agrarians. Many were just independents at that point.
