Postwar

175

West Berlin itself had taken on something of a counter-cultural tone in these years. Fossilized by its peculiar isolation at the heart of international political tensions, dependant on handouts from Bonn and Washington, its future lastingly impermanent, the city was suspended in time and space. This made it rather appealing to dissidents, radicals and others who sought out the political and cultural fringe. The irony of West Berlin’s situation—that its survival as a bohemian outpost of the West depended entirely on the presence of American soldiers—was lost on many of its youthful residents.

176

Echoes of this inversion were to be heard again at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, when its German opponents did not hesitate to cast America as the twentieth century’s leading war criminal… and Germany as its first victim.

177

Though it was replaced by a newly mythologized version in which Stalin himself—and his crimes—passed half unacknowledged.

178

The credibility of the Soviet system rested to a quite extraordinary extent upon its capacity to get results from the land. For most of its eighty-year life, agriculture was on an emergency footing in one way or another. This would not have struck an eighteenth-century European or even a twentieth-century African observer as especially unusual; but the Soviet Union was held to rather higher standards of performance.

179

A year after his release, Sinyavsky emigrated to France and took up a post teaching Russian literature at the Sorbonne. Daniel stayed in Russia, where he died in 1988.

180

Although the best-known reform economist of the Sixties was a Czech, Ota Sik, it was the Hungarian school that had the broadest influence and the most practical impact.

181

Djilas was imprisoned for four years when The New Class appeared in the West, and re-incarcerated for a further four years shortly after his release.

182

Richard Nixon was by no means the last American to be seduced by the Romanian dictator. Impressed by Nicolae Ceausescu during a visit to Romania in 1978, Senator George McGovern praised him as “among the world’s leading proponents of arms control”; and as late as September 1983, when the awful truth about Ceausescu’s regime was already widely known, Vice President George Bush memorably described him as “one of Europe’s good Communists.”

183

The French translation of the Open Letter that circulated in Paris the following year was distributed by Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire, a Trotskyist organization.

184

Of the approximately 30,000 Jews in mid-Sixties Poland, less than 7,500 belonged to the official Jewish organizations.

185

In 1966 a Polish-language edition of the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was unofficially circulated in Party groups, universities and the army.

186

Novotny was not the only one afraid of a backlash. On April 5th 1963, the Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti secretly wrote to ask Novotny and his colleagues to delay news of the rehabilitation of Slansky and other trial victims until after the forthcoming Italian elections. As the PCI’s chief well understood, it was not only Czechs who had good cause to be disgusted at their leaders’ collaboration in covering up large-scale judicial murder just ten years before.

187