Postwar

By 1980 the Soviet Union was releasing almost as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the United States—a statistic that would until very recently have been a source of pride rather than embarrassment for its admirers.

212

Within certain limits environmental protest—because of its ostensibly apolitical character—offered a safe space for political action and national self-expression in otherwise restrictive regimes. By 1983 the problem of water pollution had brought fully 10 percent of the population of Soviet Lithuania into a ‘Lithuanian Nature Protection Association’.

213

Heideggerian existentialism in this key opened another link to the West: the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier had many years before claimed to see in the existentialism of his contemporaries (like Sartre) a ‘subjective barrier’ against what he excoriated as ‘objective materialism’ and ‘technology’, In later decades, Mounier’s intellectual heirs in the circle of writers on the journal Esprit would be among the first in Western Europe to publish and celebrate Havel and his fellow dissidents.

214

In the same years Moscow even funded the minuscule American Communist Party to the tune of $42 million, a revealing exercise in undiscriminating generosity.

215

On April 13th 1976, just nine weeks before the Italian elections, Kissinger publicly declared that the US would ‘not welcome’ a Communist role in the government of Italy—thereby confirming Berlinguer’s intuitions.

216

One of Brandt’s first decisions upon taking office in 1969 was to rename the ‘Ministry for All-German Questions’ as the ‘Ministry for Inter-German Relations’: to allay East German fears that the Federal Republic would continue to assert its legal claim to speak for all Germans, and to indicate his readiness to treat with the GDR as a distinctive and enduring entity.

217

This legal fiction, and the emotional issues surrounding it, account for the Christian Democratic Party’s initial reluctance to sign the 1973 Basic Treaty which established relations with East Germany—and for the CD’s continuing insistence upon keeping open the issue of the eastern frontiers right up to 1990.

218

From the very start of Ostpolitik, special attention and privileges were accorded to Volksdeutsche, Germans still living beyond the frontiers of Germany, to the east or south. Defined by family or ethnic origin, such people were accorded full citizenship if they could reach the Federal Republic. Hundreds of thousands of residents of Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Hungary and elsewhere suddenly rediscovered German backgrounds they had taken great pains to deny for the previous half century.

219

The first ‘Helsinki Group’ was founded on May 12th 1976, in Moscow. Its eleven initial members included Yuri Orlov, Yelena Bonner and Anatoly Sharansky. Helsinki Watch, the international umbrella organization set up specifically to publicize rights abuses in the Helsinki signatory states, was born two years later.

220

The Makronisos’ warders’ practice of forcing Communists to repent and then turn on those who refused was remarkably similar to Romanian Communist techniques in the prison at Pitesti in the same years, albeit marginally less vicious. See Chapter 6.

221

At first, as elsewhere in Europe, the US expected to find friends and allies on the centre-left of the Greek political spectrum. It was soon disabused of this, however, and switched to a close and enduring friendship with the nationalist and military Right.

222

And to Costas Gavras’ influential 1969 film Z, based on the Lambrakis affair.

223

The officers, most of them formed in military cadet schools under the pre-war dictatorship of Ioannis