The preceding chapter has argued that memory has been a democratising force by making consciousness the centre of resistance to attempts to maintain total power over people. Communicative and cultural memory maintained national traditions, developed civic informality, and prefigured public opinion. In other words, the memory representing traumatic experiences in one's country's past could become a source of freedom and identity. Whereas democratisation can be linked to truthfulness and existential representation in the past, one needs to bear in mind that, since the age of the democratic revolutions in the late eighteenth century, the emergence of democratic politics has been associated with a utopian bent and expectations of a better future. The communist experiment rooted identities in an alternative form of ‘second’ reality, which would see popular sovereignty in the abolition of oppression. It attempted to legitimise political domination not by security, property, or liberty but by the promise of salvation and total freedom, which could be attained by the transformation of human nature and the advent of a new society. This chapter argues that democratic consciousness under communism was not generated primarily by preferences of enlightened democrats; rather, it was a reaction against communism's ideological prescription of totality. Rejecting the utopian and teleological project of the second reality required grounding existence in concrete life, not in fantasies of salvation.