Allen Ginsberg postcard condemns 'Red Lands' of eastern Europe

A postcard from Allen Ginsberg, in which the Beat poet writes of how "communism just doesn't work" after witnessing it in action in what he called the "Red Lands" of eastern Europe, is set to go up for auction.

Writing eight years before the fall of the Berlin Wall to his fellow poet Diane di Prima, Ginsberg tells how he spent some months travelling on both sides of the Iron Curtain with his partner Peter Orlovsky, a poet and actor.

"Peter & I are back from couple months … Hungary-Austria-Switzerland-Germany – made little money but saw a lot – Red Lands not good, Hungary pretty dreary bureaucracy – I guess communism just doesn't work," wrote Ginsberg on the back of an image of the Swiss Alps.

Ginsberg's father was a socialist and his mother a supporter of the Communist Party, an upbringing which perhaps inspired the line in his 1956 first-person poem America: "I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry." But by 1970, when Ginsberg was accused of being a "commie" by Donald Manes, he insisted in a letter to the New York City council member that he was not "as a matter of fact, a member of the Communist Party, nor am I dedicated to the overthrow of this or any government by violence. I am in fact a pacifist … [and] I must say that I see little difference between the armed and violent governments both communist and capitalist that I have observed."

Ginsberg, who died in 1997 at the age of 70 in New York, went on to describe how he was expelled from Cuba in February 1965 "because I had consistently criticised the police bureaucracy of Cuba for persecution of homosexuals, repressive laws against marijuana use, and harassment of bearded hiply dressed youths", and how he was expelled from Czechoslovakia on 7 May 1965 after 100,000 Prague citizens elected him May King at a student festival.

Addressing the accusation from a school board that "Allen Ginsberg … an admitted communist … has written some of the most filthiest, vulgar books that was ever written in America", Ginsberg told Manes that "such claims, aside from their perverse grammar, inaccuracy of fact, and silly overstatement, are exactly like the claims of Communist Party hacks attacking authors like Solzhenitsyn, Voznesensky, or [Alexander] Ginzberg in Russia."

In his 1981 message to Di Prima, with whom he co-founded Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Ginsberg concludes that "Socialist Austria seems pretty free & independent minded", but ending his postcard: "Lots of yakking & snow & ice & cold & Poetry & movies … Love Allen."

The card will be auctioned online by Nate D Sanders on 29 April, with the auction house calling it "especially fascinating since [Ginsberg] had a history of communist ties". Bidding for the letter begins at $250 (£150).