The EU's Green Deal Looks Like Soviet Central Planning"—Historian Ion Mischevca

Dr Mischevca sees the EU for what it really is, an incipient super-state, dedicated to the same ideals of central planning as the Soviet Union.

From The European Conservative

By Álvaro Peñas

“We emit just 7–8% of the world’s emissions, but Brussels wants to shut down our industries to save the planet.”

Ion Mischevca is a Moldovan historian and journalist known for his outspoken critiques of neo-Marxism and European bureaucracy. He is the author of Who Are We? Historical Essay on the 100 Years of the Great Union and Manifesto for Unification: An Antidote to Neo-Marxism and Progressivism. 

Speaking at a panel on the EU’s Green Pact at the MEGA conference in Chişinǎu, Mischevca argued that the bloc’s climate agenda resembles Soviet-style central planning—top-down, undemocratic, and divorced from economic and scientific realities. 

Drawing on Moldova’s experience under communism, he warned that the Green Deal risks sacrificing European prosperity, sovereignty, and freedom in pursuit of an unachievable environmental ideal.

You compare the Green Deal of the European Union with the projects carried out by the Soviet Union. What do they have in common? 

Moldova is a post-Soviet country, and although there are some differences with what we have experienced here, there are many similarities in the concept of the European Green Deal. This idea was born from Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and bureaucrats who have never been elected by anyone. Yet they decide what farmers should do, how the factories should work, etc. 

It is basically the same kind of centralized economy that we had in the Soviet Union, run by Party bureaucrats who had not been elected by anybody. Of course, in the constitution of the Soviet Union, there was talk of people’s democracy, but as it is now in Brussels, it was completely undemocratic. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and all the others ruled by means of “diktats,” as the European Commission does now: we need quotas, we cannot produce this or that, and so on. And, as then, all these plans are very nice on paper.

It sounds very familiar, but the reality was very different.

Yes, in Moldova we had a great centralized and productive economy on paper, but it was a false reality. The centralized, planned, and regularized economy now advocated by Brussels is something completely communist and we don’t want it; we already fought against it, and we don’t want to go through it again.

There is also a false perception of guilt that has taken over the leadership of the European Union: we were colonizers, and now we have to help all the countries of the world, integrate illegal immigrants into our societies, etc. 

This idea is absurd when more than half of the European countries have themselves been colonized at some point. Moldova was a colony of the Soviet Union, as were Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Lithuania. We were victims and we cannot feel guilty for what we have not done. Therefore, we cannot accept that unelected bureaucrats in Brussels are using Europe’s colonial past as a justification to impose drastic carbon reduction policies today. Moreover, even if we were to reduce emissions to zero, what environmental impact would this have on the world? It would be practically negligible because we only emit 7-8%, while countries like China, India, and the United States will continue to pollute. 

Even if we were to close all our factories, as the advocates of the Green Pact want, we are not going to save the planet.

Did the Soviets also use guilt to control their satellite states, the way you suggest the EU does now?

That’s right, and it is another similarity with what Brussels is doing now. The occupied countries had to accept all the sacrifices demanded because they had been on the wrong side of history, they had supported fascism. Actually, there was no wrong side, because both systems, fascism and communism, are ideological brothers.

Another parallel is the way ‘science’ is treated as unquestionable truth—used to silence debate and enforce ideology. We saw this during the pandemic with a lot of restrictions in the name of science, even though there was no unanimity in the scientific community. Today, we’re told that ‘science’ has decided the EU must slash carbon emissions—or face catastrophe. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union: atheism and Marxism were science, and if you didn’t obey, you were not only against the regime, you were also against science.

If EU emissions are such a small part of the global picture, is the entire climate agenda just a distraction from deeper problems?

Of course, the European Union is trying to hide the real problems: mass immigration, the economic and housing crisis, the culture war, and so on. Instead of dealing with these realities, a lot of money is being spent on fighting for the environment when we are a continent that hardly pollutes. We have hundreds of regulations, something in which we also resemble the Soviet Union.

Let’s think, for example, about recycling. I am in favor of recycling, but the problem is that the factories that melt plastic are very polluting, so in the end, we get the opposite of what we intended. In Moldova, we receive a lot of medical waste from the European Union. What do we do with that waste? Bury it underground! To save the planet, we pollute the soil.

Underlying all of this is a Marxist idea: that ordinary people shouldn’t own property—no land, no livestock, no car, nothing. If a person has no property, he is vulnerable and dependent on the state; he can be made obedient and share any opinion. If you take away a person’s property—“you will have nothing and you will be happy”—you are taking away his freedom. Basically, the European Union is right now a neo-Marxist construction.

Who’s cashing in on this green revolution?

There are a lot of lobbying interests and environmental activists who are basically neo-Marxists, but who have made a way of life out of this agenda because there is a lot of money at stake. But the biggest beneficiaries are countries like China, that are occupying the space that Europeans are leaving. It seems that in Brussels, there are bureaucrats and politicians more concerned about “Make China Great Again” than defending our interests. I have been to five EU countries in the past year, and in all of them, I have seen that there is an invasion of Chinese products—cheaper and of lower quality—which do not suffer from the excessive regulation that we apply to our products.

Brussels is now talking about reindustrialisation—but after years of deindustrialising Europe, can we take this U-turn seriously? 

The war in Ukraine did not start in 2022 but in 2014, and it has shown how hypocritical the European establishment is. After the occupation of Crimea and the creation of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, the EU proceeded with the construction of Nord Stream and continued to buy gas from the Russian Federation, strengthening Putin and giving him all the money he needed for the full-scale war in 2022. We must start in 2014 to see the whole picture and understand that, until very recently, they have financed the war. Now they want reindustrialization, but they should have thought about that before closing nuclear and coal plants.

But change is urgent and necessary. I was in Spain in March when the big blackout happened. I was working on a Microsoft database, which had its own power supply, but I went out into the street and saw a city where nothing was working. The blackout was the result of a massive influx of green energy, that’s the official reason, and the power system of Portugal, Spain, and the south of France was disconnected. 

In their eagerness to promote this green energy, they are not thinking about the consequences. As the conservative writer Douglas Murray says: “This woke culture, this green hysteria, these new neo-Marxist ideas are moving too fast and without taking precautions.” 

We must stop and think about everything that is being done if we want to avoid a catastrophe and also put an end to the censorship that Brussels wants to impose on all those who do not have the same opinion. As JD Vance said, “without freedom of speech, there is no freedom,” and he is absolutely right.

You’ve pointed to real-world consequences—like the deaths in Spain’s blackout—but no one takes responsibility. Why is there never any accountability when green policies fail?

This lack of responsibility is also very Soviet. They make decisions that shape our future, but when those decisions go wrong, no one is held accountable. Instead, they hide behind vague claims of collective decisions, higher authorities, or blame society as a whole. The deportations, murders, and famines carried out by the Soviet Union were not just the work of an abstract regime—they were carried out by individuals, people with names and faces, who made and executed those decisions. The bad decisions being made in the European Union also have names and faces.

Pictured: Ion Mischevca