Hitch-22

well. And by the end of it, as the routine standing ovation of the Central Committee was being shown, the argument in our ranks was already under way.

Apart from those few who stubbornly thought that Castro had done and said the right thing by taking the Brezhnev line, the main division was between those who thought he had acted under duress and those who felt he was expressing his real ideological kinship. I thought it could well be both: it was obvious that Cuban Communism depended upon Soviet oil and weapons to survive but even had this not been so, Castro in his speech had been frigidly unsympathetic to the desire of the Czechoslovaks to live a life that was more open to the market economy, more attuned to the culture of the United States, and more adapted to the open societies of Western Europe.

Once more making the stern attempt to be dialectical about this, I think I concluded without actually admitting it to myself that Castroism might still have a point in Latin America and the Caribbean, where monstrously reactionary dictatorships like those of Brazil and Nicaragua and Haiti were still undergirded by cynical American power. However, in more advanced Europe the impulses of a revolutionary Left could and should be used to erode the Berlin Wall from both sides. There were a number of brave Trotskyists among the Czech resistance, after all, led by the heroic Peter Uhl… Anyway, I do not completely hate myself for attempting this book balancing. And I can say with some pride that our small International Socialist contingent in Havana managed to receive a rolled-up tube of a special edition of Socialist Worker from London by way of the mail, and that this edition was headed in big bold black capitals: “Russians Get Out of Czechoslovakia!” To have handed this out in Cuba during a world crisis was for me a matter of socialist honor and gave me an irrepressible sense of participating in a genuinely historic moment. It seemed so clear that the ossified, torpid Communist systems and parties had committed a kind of political and moral suicide by their Panzerkommunismus (Ernst Fischer’s acid phrase) conduct in Prague. Yet this seemed to offer a chance that in France, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and in the yet-to-be-liberated territories of the “Third World,” the brave soixante- huitards were clearing the way for a “real” and authentic Left to emerge at last.

The long-delayed Czech charter flight almost failed to clear the palm trees at the fringe of Havana Airport— something to do with a wrong guess about the weight of the luggage—but the expressions of the crew conveyed a generally listless attitude. They were returning to a country where the state-decreed slogan was that of postinvasion “normalization” (one of the most casually ugly phrases of the whole twentieth century). Once again we had a stopover in Canada and on the TV screens saw the Chicago police beating puddles of blood out of the demonstrators who were willing to pit themselves against a filthy war, a racist Democratic Party machine, and a fixed convention. Damn it, I remember thinking. I have missed Prague and now I am missing Chicago.

“Tourist of the Revolution” was a phrase that was later used to ridicule those who went in search of socialist fatherlands, but I truly did not think of myself as a tourist. I simply and exhaustingly and fervently wished I could be in many places at once, so as to lean the uttermost of my slight weight onto the fulcrum. It was years later that I read Thomas Paine saying that to have played a part in two revolutions was “to have lived to some purpose.” This was the sort of eloquence that I wish I could have commanded at the time.

However, I was still somewhat imprisoned within the jargon of Left sectarianism. By the time our plane had landed in London, with the Czechs continuing morosely homeward and I myself being subjected to yet another police scrutiny of my passport and my person, the new post-Chicago headline of Socialist Worker read like this: “East and West: Tanks and Cops Defend ‘Freedom.’ ” To a point, I approved this moral equivalence. It was at any rate better than those who only moaned painlessly about Prague (which the West had not defended) or those who were only moved to protest about Vietnam. The verbal crudeness of the headline’s phrasing bothered me less than it should have done. After all, as our plane had neared London, we had been told that one of our number might possibly be detained and even deported upon arrival. He was a South African exile. Nothing more needed to be said: we all knew that we would form a cluster around him, pile our luggage into the shape of a barricade, raise our fists and utter the most obvious chants of resistance until we could be sure that a proper left-wing lawyer had arrived. The risk of our own detention or blacklisting would have been nothing more than the payment of a duty. Had you then accused me of being “sloganistic” in my politics, I would have considered it no great insult.

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliche is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

Back in Oxford I ran into “The Warden” in the High Street. He was very much his usual self, bustling and brimming and half-deferential, half-ironic. “My dear Christopher, just the man I wanted to tell. We have a new fellow coming to the college: a new recruit as you would probably say, but a hero, an absolute hero. Bit of a Marxist I’m afraid but it can’t be helped. You must meet him.” This was my introduction to Leszek Kolakowski, who was then not much known outside his native Poland. He had been one of the “reform Communist” intellectuals of the “Polish spring” of 1956, a moment that had inaugurated a period of relative openness under the Gomulka regime. The reactionary and anti-Jewish crackdown of 1968, presaged by the arrest and imprisonment of Kuron and Modzelewski, had put all this into reverse. Kolakowski had, like so many of the intellectual leadership of Eastern Europe, been partly deported and partly self-exiled. He had at first gone to teach philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley—a campus whose name was near-sacred to those of us who felt we were breathing the pure air of the Sixties—but had evidently tired of this already and was willing to come to All Souls.[20]

Kolakowski had missed his “formal” education because of the Nazi occupation of his country but had more than made up for it by the hungry ingestion of books during the wartime underground years, during which time he had also become a consecrated Communist. When we eventually met, I was first of all and perhaps rather foolishly impressed by how exactly he looked his part. Victor Laszlo in Casablanca simply seems too sleek and well-fed to have been a survivor of Nazi penal institutions (I still shudder when I think how nearly Ronald Reagan came to being cast as Rick in that movie) but Leszek had the ideally gaunt, austere appearance of the dissident who has known what it is to suffer material as well as intellectual deprivation.[21] His voice and manner, also, were appropriately ironic and sardonic. And he had, in effect, seen all the way through Communism. In my boyish way I thought I had done the same. But—and I cannot tell you how much this argument used to matter—I would not concede that Leninism and Stalinism were the same thing, or that the second logically followed from the first. After much wrestling and juggling, Kolakowski had simply given up on the whole idea of “reform” Communism, or was at any rate in the throes of doing so. I did not believe that Stalin’s system could be reformed, but I was quite convinced that it could and would only be overturned by, and from, the Left. Kolakowski was quite patient with me. At the time—and how embarrassing I now find it to say this —I thought that it was I who was being quite indulgent to him.

The Polish ambassador to London, a doltish apparatchik named Marian Dobrosielski, was invited to Oxford to give a talk. With the help of some Polish leftist friends to act as translators for the Polish press on file at St. Anthony’s College, I managed to draft and print a leaflet, in Polish and English, telling the Stalinist envoy that he was not welcome. I asked Kolakowski if he’d come to the event and help to swell our protest. He declined, saying rather drily that there was little point in such commonplace encounters. We went ahead anyway, and gave Ambassador Dobrosielski quite a bad time, and just as the evening was breaking up I saw a bony and quizzical visage peering from a dark corner at the very back of the hall. Leszek had not, after all, been able to resist showing up. At the time, I thought that this was a small triumph for Trotskyism over “mere” anti- Communism. In fact, Kolakowski was just beginning to erect the edifice of his astonishing trilogy Main Currents of Marxism. I was fabulously lucky in having met him so early, but much too callow and overconfident to take full advantage of the chance I’d been given. Still, for almost the next two decades of my life I carried on an argument with him, and others like him, about the nature of Communism. Yes, the germ of Stalinism had been in Leninism to begin with. But had there not been other germs as well? And what historical conditions led