Postwar

Instituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, Instituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Elettrica.

262

Evgenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (Harcourt, 1967); Margarete Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1957); Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution (Pathfinder Press, 1979), first published in Cologne in 1955 as Die Revolution entlasst ihre Kinder; Victor Serge, Memoires d’un revolutionnaire (Paris, 1951); Boris Souvarine, Stalin. A Critical Survey of Bolshevism (first published in English in 1939).

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Between 1975 and 1981 France alone took in 80,000 refugees from Indo-China.

264

In 1963, long after he had lost interest in France’s own Communists, the author of Les Mains Sales could still be heard in Prague enthusing about Socialist Realism to a bemused audience of Czech writers and intellectuals.

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‘La responsabilite envers l’Histoire dispense de la responsabilite envers les etres humains’.

266

‘Pour ma part, je pense que s’il y a une grande cause aujourd’hui, c’est la defense des intellectuals.’ See Le Nouvel Observateur, #1140, septembre 1986, ‘Les Grandes Causes, ca existe encore?’

267

Antonino Bruno, Marxismo e Idealismo Italiano (1977), pp. 99-100.

268

Curiously, it was the Czechoslovak government’s decision to ratify the UN human rights Covenants in 1976— the 35th state to do so—that made those Covenants binding under international law.

269

But even environmentalism had its internal dissidents. Milan Simecka, the Slovak writer, warned his colleagues (Havel among them) against underestimating the benefits of modernity: ‘I am of the opinion that even the pollution that accompanies industrial prosperity is better than the chaos and brutality which plagues those societies in which people are unable to satisfy their basic needs.’ Milan Simecka, ‘A World With Utopias or Without Them’, Cross-Currents, 3 (1984), p. 26.

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Yugoslavia is the exception that illustrates the rule: ‘As there had never been an official culture established in Yugoslavia (which did not prevent the existence of official figures in cultural life), there could never be its natural opposite, an underground, alternative or parallel culture, such as was richly cherished by other socialist countries.’ Dubravka Ugresic, The Culture of Lies (1998), page 37.

271

With good reason. As we have since learned, the British and West German peace movements of the time were thoroughly penetrated by Soviet and East German intelligence.

272

During the 1980s Poland and Czechoslovakia both slipped into negative economic growth—their economies actually shrinking. The economy of the USSR itself had probably been shrinking since 1979.

273

Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity (NY, 1989), page 9.

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