Gergely Gulyás, Head of the Prime Minister's Office, said remembering the victims of communism is both a task and a duty.

Speaking at a ceremony marking the Memorial Day for the Victims of Communism in Budapest on Tuesday, Gulyás called communism "one of the biggest tragedies in history".

In his speech at the ceremony in front of the House of Terror Museum, Gulyás said those who wanted to understand the essence of communism should visit the museum.

"We can thank God that Hungary today is free and that we can live free," he said, warning that "a few boxes of the last breath of communism have been imported by the West" and that "for the Western left, communism still represents a kind of power base".

Gulyás called for confronting the difficulties of remembrance and the "incomprehensibility of the scale of the tragedy since one’s heart cannot accept the suffering and death of so many people, human compassion cannot cope with it".

Gulyás said remembrance was simultaneously an opportunity, a task and a duty, adding that "the past is never gone because historical tragedies are here with us". He said remembrance and the paying of respect followed naturally from the fact "that we are one nation and we belong together".

Gulyás said communism, which had caused the deaths of around 100 million people worldwide, had resulted in lost generations, misled communities, destroyed social groups, cultures and civilisations, humiliated families and dead people.

He noted that during the democratic transition in Hungary, people could buy cans with a label that read "the last breath of communism". He said it appeared that "some of these cans were imported by Western Europe and enriched with preservatives," and after the change of regime, "cooperation with communists became fashionable in the West".

"The free world, which has built an unprecedented level of prosperity, clearly doesn’t learn from history," he added.

Gulyás said cooperation with parties rooted in communism represented a "power base" for the Western left, while they saw nationally minded parties as "unacceptable far-right parties".

He said every generation needed to be reminded of what the victims of communism had done for freedom.

Maria Schmidt, the director of the House of Terror Museum, said Hungary had observed a day dedicated to remembering the victims of the communist dictatorship since 2002, adding that she was proud that Hungarians were a nation who confronted their past and named the perpetrators of communist crimes.