On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, sparking the democratization of communist regimes across Europe. By late 1991, the Soviet Union had dissolved. The end of communism exerted profound systemic effects beyond the region. While scholarship has primarily examined public memories of these events as articulated by leaders, far less attention has been paid to the experiences of millions of grassroots militants. For them, the collapse triggered a profound sense of loss, as it dissolved the "markers of certainty" that had anchored their identities and political lives. This paper explores how these militants experienced the transition from communism to post-communism from an existential perspective. What emotions did they feel amid the crisis of their political home? How did they react to the erosion of their ideals and culture? In what ways was their identity reshaped? Do their memories reveal symptoms of a search for the lost community? To what extent is communist nostalgia linked to the vanishing of the messianic hope of building a "paradise on earth" through socialist revolutions? Drawing on concepts of liminality and social drama—introduced by van Gennep and Turner, and adapted to the social sciences and history by Szakolczai, Wydra, Thomassen, and Forlenza—this paper analyzes militants' personal narratives. Through an examination of letters and diaries, the paper demonstrates how the end of communism symbolized the closure of horizons of expectation. This exposed the communists' body politic to what Italian ethnographer Ernesto de Martino termed a "crisis of presence." Stripped of their community and meaningful symbols, militants endured a trauma of separation from prior forms of political life. They confronted the catastrophic end of what Voegelin described as the "immanentization of the eschaton," which impaired their ability to compete with emerging liberal-progressive and populist ideologies in the aftermath of the apocalyptic demise of their world.