The Atlantic and Its Enemies

19. The Kremlin Consolations

The troubles of the Atlantic West were compounded by foreign affairs. Moscow seemed to have in many ways the demand hand, with Americans and Germans coming back and forth, to offer this and that, in return for insubstantial concessions. Seen from Moscow, the later seventies were not a bad time; they ended with a classic piece of triumphalism, the Olympic Games of 1980, for which Moscow was cleaned up, acquiring some more huge buildings in the process — a hotel complex called ‘International One’ and ‘International Two’, otherwise known as the ‘Hammer Horror’, constructed for world trade exhibition purposes at the behest of the aged and, now, iguana-like go-between, Armand Hammer. Undesirables were cleared out of town, and the centre became a sort of Forbidden City. To the sky-scraper foreign ministry, the clients and satellites came and went; and there was a new, expanded Soviet navy going round the world, its crews coming back to port, gleefully bringing cheap jeans and ballpoint pens, at home in short supply. The chief preoccupation was China, no doubt, but she was in no splendid condition; Mao died in 1976, leaving a battle for succession in a country that had experienced a grotesque version of the War Communism that had nearly destroyed Russia in 1919. True, there was a Chinese-American understanding of sorts, but America was also in no happy state. President Carter, grinning and maladroit, did not inspire respect. Europe was also not a threat — very far from it. The main NATO element, Great Britain, was in steep decline; the Germans had run to Moscow, signed away thousands of millions in return for a few old-age pensioners’ trips to West Berlin, and the promise that the West Germans could pay some more millions to buy out political prisoners. Besides, matters in the West began to worsen again. The ‘stagflation’ period ended raggedly in 1975, and two years of relative stability followed. But then in 1978 things went sour again, with another twofold increase in oil prices, and another bout of inflation. England was in especially bad shape, and even appeared to be near collapse; another important NATO country, Turkey, was on the edge of civil war; Italy was in disrepair, her governments needing Communist support; and the Shah of Iran fled in January 1979, having been overthrown by a sort of bazaar-Islam revolution that Communists regarded with glee, not imagining that it would destroy them as well. When oil prices doubled, within a few weeks, the USSR profited.

It was true that the USSR was not itself in brilliant health, but its leaders were comparing the Moscow of 1975 with the Moscow they had known in Stalin’s time, and there was no likeness. Later on, the years between Khrushchev and Brezhnev were called ‘the period of stagnation’, but the term is not entirely accurate: some parts of the system worked well enough, and the men who succeeded Khrushchev had had quite enough of reform schemes that went awry. His fall was arranged by men of much cautiousness who were already not young; Leonid Brezhnev had seen the Second World War, had been a minor lion in the occupation of Hungary, and was not far off sixty. The others were much the same. Khrushchev had terrified them with the Cuban gamble, and they had been much dismayed at the internal turmoil associated with his campaign against Stalinism: intellectuals such as Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn had broken free and there had even been an ugly riot-cum-strike or two in the south. Khrushchev’s schemes to divide the Party between industrial and agrarian wings had been particularly convulsive, and he was overthrown in 1964, when he was seventy, for gambling. After the usual year or two of obscure manoeuvrings, Leonid Brezhnev emerged as successor, and his overall line was simple: ‘Reform, reform: people ought to work better, that’s the problem.’ He was right; the whole system was, as an East German critic said, a permanent Bummelstreik, what the French called a grève de zèle, the only English equivalent of which is ‘bloody-mindedness’. Brezhnev stopped the assaults on Stalin, and even installed a small work on the Kremlin Wall in commemoration of him. Khrushchev’s reforms were reversed, and a re-reform, given the name of Brezhnev’s (for a time) head of government associate, Kosygin, restored the powers of the central ministries, twenty-seven of them by 1975, with two dozen ‘main administrations’ covering assorted products. Khrushchev’s regional economic councils were scrapped, because there was a danger that these councils would be taken over by some republican — in effect nationalist — coterie. The authority of Gosplan — the State Planning Committee — was reinforced. Of course, the centralization of things meant preposterous inefficiencies and delays. The Rosa Luxemburg knitwear factory in Kiev complained that it had to report on the fulfilment of fifteen different indicators, and authorization from above was needed even for small sums of money. An idea of the Kosygin reforms was for pretend firms to be set up, giving out a bonus to managers, as distinct from ‘main administrations’, but of course this led to abuse, hence demands for more central control, hence larger monopolies.

But at least corruption was under some sort of control, and there was even a hope that information technology (meaning computers) would bring dramatic improvements as regards the mountains of paperwork. Economists anxious to keep up with the West suggested computerization to deal with the tidal wave of information coming in, and Vasily Nemchinov’s Central Mathematics-Economics Institute devised a new planning system called ‘Optimal Functioning’. OGAS, ‘a total informational processing system with an analytical function’, lumbered onto the stage in 1971, but computers were distinguished only by their weight, and managers resented young computer scientists telling them what to do. Print-outs sprawled their way across dirty factory floors, and the managers just got on with managing in the old ways, but such problems were not unknown in the West. In any case, and it is one of the extraordinary features of this period, Western economists of considerable reputation took the Soviet economy very seriously. John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, thought that the full employment that the Soviet system ensured was admirable, and whole institutes were set up in Vienna and points west to examine the workings of the Soviet economy. In England, hardly an advertisement for capitalism, there was an institute at Birmingham University to study the workings of the Polish economy, directed by an Italian Keynesian, Mario Nuti; a great cemetery of information was installed, R. W. Davies the chief undertaker. At least with economic affairs, there were some facts to deal with; libraries to build up, and on the whole, in such institutions, the remarks of ‘Solzhenitsyn et al.’ were dismissed. The grandest of these Sovietologists was E. H. Carr, who had written a multivolume history of the Russian Revolution and stopped it in 1929, when collectivization of agriculture happened, and the information shut down. Poor Davies, a Welsh Communist and not a dishonest man, attached himself to the far grander Carr, who said that murdering peasants was one of the prices to pay for progress, to chronicle the advance of the Soviet Union beyond 1929, and even to call his volumes on the murderous collectivization, ‘The Socialist Offensive’. The next generation of students was brought up on such tomes, and was therefore caught gawping when the Soviet Union collapsed. (This writer will not plead innocent: as late as 1987, he was telling students that the USSR had ‘solved the nationality problem’, the worst mistake in academic life that he has ever made, and fortunately not preserved in print. At the time, minority nationalism was causing pointless mayhem in countries that he knew about — Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Spain.)

People who said that nationalism in the USSR was very much alive, and very angry, were of course right, but their evidence at the time consisted of trivialities and impressions — a girl at a Latvian boat-race wearing a T-shirt with a Latvian inscription; a Ukrainian Catholic imprisoned for decades, and emerging, incoherently, with a grand beard, to massacre English at a press conference. Vladimir Bukovsky, a long-term victim of the system, and utterly irrepressible, could not believe his ears and eyes when at last, in 1976, he came to the West and was asked to lecture at the Ford Foundation and suchlike: eyes of naïve vacancy, peering through festoons of hair, to put stupefyingly silly questions. President Carter refused to meet him, and the Ford Foundation missed him off the Christmas card list; in revenge, he wrote a book, based on the Soviet archives, that demonstrated quite how misguided they had been, in the style of the ‘useful idiots’ whom Lenin had found such bores. When the founder of jogging dropped dead at the age of fifty-four, Bukovsky responded with glee.

As regards the Soviet economy of this period, Alain Besançon remarked, ‘It is a strange feature of the sovietological world that a certain economic approach to Soviet reality, however knowledgeable, honest and sophisticated, meets, in people with a different approach, a disbelief so vast that they do not even bother to criticize — not knowing where to begin, let alone to inform themselves further. It is much like the attitude of the dissidents to official statistics, or the figures at which the Western economists arrive: derision and shoulder-shrugging.’ These dissidents ‘et al.’ were of course closer to the truth than their Western critics, and their derision was even shared by the more astute elements in the KGB, such as (no doubt) Vladimir Putin. But for the moment the USSR functioned. Rockets fired off; disarmament discussions went on with Americans who could not quite reconcile the pot-holes in the Moscow roads with the satellites in space (New York, going bankrupt at the time?). And there was always the cultural argument. A concert by Svyatoslav Richter was unanswerable. There was something about Russia that produced musicians of a world class beyond compare. A certain conservatoire tradition, an intelligently critical public concentrating culturally because the political economy was so primitive, or just grown-up attitudes towards alcohol and cigarettes: who knows why?

In this perspective, Brezhnev becomes understandable, because the USSR worked, and the West did not. Leonid Brezhnev was now in charge of a vast system in which only the KGB really knew what was happening, through its huge network of informers, and under him that organization came to be all-important. Stalin had controlled it by the simplest of methods, a periodic cull. Now, and this was Khrushchev’s contribution, such culling was not possible: to that he himself owed his life, as he said. The system worked for a time, and quite well, because of an external factor, the rise in commodity prices, and especially oil and gold. In the early 1970s Western investment also went into pipelines to carry natural gas to Germany, the lines amounting to a length four times that of the globe’s circumference. By 1985 gas was almost fifteen times greater in volume than in 1965 and development might have been more had the road system been better developed (lorries, ubiquitous in the system, chugged along at less than the speed of a decent bicycle). With these sums in foreign currency, Moscow could still indulge some megalomania, and a Brezhnev could carry on in the old way: the ‘A’ system launched its space-shots and intervened all over the world. It even built an enormous navy, in the 1970s, and made itself felt in parts of the world that were new to it, such as the Middle East. The basis was being eaten away, but external help could be obtained, as had happened in any crisis of the system, from the Volga Famine of 1921-2 to Hitler’s attack in 1941. The Western world just needed to be reminded of the importance of Russia.

It was of course true that the peoples of what the West called eastern Europe were ‘captive nations’. That problem was not, in Brezhnev’s eyes, enormously serious. The West had become disinterested in the subject at Teheran in 1943, when Churchill had in effect agreed to a displacement of Poland, bodily moved west into Pomerania and Silesia at the expense of Podolia and Volhynia. East Germans had rebelled in 1953, and had been widely ignored. Yugoslavia had been disaffected by Stalin, was not part of the Soviet empire, but co-operated with it, and as a Communist country worked, like the USSR, as a purported federation of nations devoted to the construction of socialism. Hungary had rebelled in 1956, and Moscow had adapted its dealings with Hungary accordingly: she had a certain room for manoeuvre, could make deals with the diaspora (like Armenia in the USSR) and even produce plans for economic reform of a sort that might at some stage have relevance for Moscow. Poland had also been allowed some headroom, and the Church was no longer persecuted. A small-farm peasantry obstinately persisted with its horses and carts, but heavy industry had been built up, and in the later seventies Western banks were anxious to invest in it, swallowing whole the propaganda that a new leader, Edward Gierek, was launching, to the effect that Poland would be the new Japan. Poles could travel to visit relatives in the West, and dissidents were picturesquely part of the scenery: the Party was a nuisance, not a tyranny. Communism, Brezhnev-vintage, was even quite a useful discipline for the Poles, whose intelligentsia, freed from romantic nationalism, became world-class.

There was a problem as regards Czechoslovakia. She was unique among the satellite states, in that her native Communists had been numerous and strong, based in a modern industry, in 1939 on much the same level as Belgium’s: true at any rate of the Czech two thirds, though not for the Slovak part. Czech Communists kept much of the investment for themselves, and Slovaks groused, as they did on cultural matters, since they counted as bumpkins, not unlike the Ukrainians over the border. A constitution of 1960 was strictly centralized, i.e. making no concessions to Slovak desires for autonomy, and collective farms were stronger than in Hungary, let alone Poland. President Antonín Novotný, visiting the Slovak cultural centre, was enraged by demands that Slovak culture should be promoted by the foreign machine; like most Czechs he did not think that there was any. There were little signs that matters were not going his way; very obscurely, key figures were moved in and out (this writer, spending a few months in prison in Bratislava at the time, had his own experience: v. Note, pp. 371-81). In 1964 Gustáv Husák made a secret speech, in the course of criticisms by the Bratislava municipal government, which led to demands from Prague for his expulsion, and Alexandr Dubček, who had a key role in matters economic, spoke up for the intelligentsia. But it was all very small-scale.

The Stalinist Novotný went on in office; as late as 1954, several months after the USSR had started to release Stalin’s victims, there was a minor purge trial, and a commission in 1957 even reaffirmed the guilt of the 1950-51 trial victims, though some were released. A huge Stalin statue even went up in 1955, demolished only when Khrushchev insisted, along with the removal of Klement Gottwald from his mausoleum. In an obscure place, much later, there was still a little ‘Stalin Square’. In Czechoslovakia there was nothing like the Polish peasantry, stubbornly stuck in subsistence agriculture; nor was there anything like the Polish Church, the Czechs having inherited a powerful anti-clerical tradition. Opposition to the Communists was enfeebled from the outset because it was itself largely Communist. It talked, and then talked again.

Still, there were signs of trouble in the woodwork, and a Party congress was postponed for several months in 1962. The 1951 purge trials continued to be a cause of unease, and there was a new commission to investigate them. In 1963 it pinned the blame on Gottwald, and by implication his close colleagues, some still in high places. A Slovak journalist — Miroslav Hysko — publicly denounced them, and was not himself arrested: the old trial verdicts were, instead, cancelled. All of this was evidence of much deeper currents. Further evidence came when a report late in 1963 stated that the campaign against Slovak nationalism in 1951 had been unjustified; and from prison there emerged Dr Husák, whom the Russians subsequently chose as their man in Prague. Novotný, an elderly figure recognizably in the Stalinist mode, was careful to dissociate himself from the old guard and only four of them remained; the warhorse Slovak secretary (Karol Bacílek, a Hungarian) was displaced in 1963 by a younger man, Dubček. Slovakia, when he was a child, had been part of old Hungary, and in the capital, Bratislava, Hungarian was still the second language. Anti-Catholicism in the later nineteenth century translated there, as in Hungary, into Communism in the twentieth, and Dubček somewhat resembled Imre Nagy in that he had spent time in the USSR, his parents having gone there; from the age of four until he was seventeen (in 1938) he had lived in Russia, and he attended the Moscow Higher Political School from 1955 to 1958. However, Imre Nagy had been galvanized by Hungarian nationalism, the original sense of the word coming from Luigi Galvani of Verona, who had noticed how a scalpel that had accidentally received an electric charge made the corpse of a frog twitch. Dubček remained something of a dead frog, and even resembled one. His speeches amounted to wooden language, with at most some sense that he opposed bureaucracy. The reformers’ candidate for president was also a veteran of the USSR, Ludvík Svoboda, who had had a role in the Communist takeover in 1948, as ostensibly non-Party defence minister. There was also trouble in the Czech lands. They had been highly industrialized, but were languishing: in 1961-3, economic growth had stopped, even been reversed. A Five Year Plan was abandoned, and in 1963 a team of experts under Ota Šik, who had been in the Politburo since 1958, argued for serious change, such that concerns’ profits should not go to the State, and management should be properly rewarded, with prices that reflected costs. A congress in 1966 approved a new system without parallel elsewhere in that world.

The backdrop was serious movement among the writers — not of course the 630 members of their union, the usual parade of elks, but in various journals, particularly Slovak, which were uncensored. The overall appeal was to the Soviet example, with denunciations of the ‘cult of personality’, and even Novotný tried to come to terms, inviting the writers to the Prague castle. But by the summer of 1967 there was deadlock at a ‘congress of the Czechoslovak writers’, and one was even imprisoned for giving details to an exile in France. Foreign Communists — Roger Garaudy and Ernst Fischer — became involved, as campaigns went ahead against the censorship, or against Czechoslovakia’s policy towards Israel. At the same time there was a burst of creativity, as Czechoslovak film made the rounds, and Milan Kundera surfaced; solemn socialism-with-a-human-face economists appeared, and Youth took a hand, protesting that repairs were not carried out in the dormitories at Strahov or that there had been a power failure. Talk went ahead, and beards nodded; the police behaved absurdly, censoring people for writing that ‘science ends where its freedom ends’ or, as in 1963, dismissing the entire editorship of an historical journal for publishing a review that indicated the gaps in a particular collection of orthodox texts. By the autumn of 1967 there was an atmosphere of crisis within the Party — itself greatly dominated by the proletariat — and there was a secret meeting, at which Dubček spoke, not for repression of the writers and students, but for a more suitable policy as regards Slovak industry. Novotný was pushed out, and the ‘Prague Spring’ burst. There was a May Day demonstration containing the banner headline ‘WITH THE SOVIET UNION FOR ALL TIME AND NOT A DAY LONGER’.

Much of this was froth. The Slovak Communists wanted federalization, and had used the Prague intellectuals to force the issue, but they warned in veiled language about any repeat of Budapest in 1956, and a Soviet general appeared to say that ‘international duty’ would be done if need be. Courts reopened cases, and there was much foreign applause, but reality lay with Husák, not Dubček. The background was manoeuvres by the Warsaw Pact, though Brezhnev in June still had ‘tears in his eyes’ to the effect that he would not intervene. The fact was that the Party still functioned; though many of the central committee delegates did not appear, in mid-July Soviet language in letters was more harsh. The French Communist Waldeck Rochet appeared to suggest an answer, and on 1 August Dubček met Brezhnev at Cierna nad Tisou, in sub-Carpathian territory on the Ukrainian border (the Soviet delegation steamed back every night to Csap, to the railwaymen’s club). Brezhnev simply did not want to see Czechoslovakia leave the Soviet zone, and did not trust her; the East Germans were adamant that Czechoslovakia must not become an Austria. Dubček was expected to restore the censorship, but the real problem lay with the Slovaks, who pressed for federalism, and would deal with Moscow rather than with a Prague intelligentsia full of its own words. The trick was then to find some old Czech proletarian characters who would collaborate, and that was quite easy. In mid-August the Russians started to use threatening, inquisitorial language. In the night of 20/21 August they moved in, an ‘appeal’ having been got together by the team that would then in effect run the country. Its furniture consisted of old trade union warhorses on the Czech side, and Slovak federalizing Communists on the other, and it was the latter who ran the regime. Gustáv Husák was installed in the presidential villa at Smichov, and Czechoslovakia then hardly disturbed the headlines for the next twenty years.

At any rate, Brezhnev in the 1970s could look on the world with a certain confidence. The West had done nothing about the Prague events, and the Germans especially were now running to Moscow, offering considerable amounts of money; they had in effect recognized East Germany and given it money, too. China was always a question mark, but Mao had left her in a very enfeebled condition, and she was even lured into a war with Vietnam. Now, events in the Middle East did call for action, and at Christmas 1979 came a clumsy lurch, one that was to prove fateful.

The Turkish generals’ coup had happened at a moment of great turmoil in the Middle East. The Shah of Iran had fallen; oil prices had doubled; and the ruler of Iraq, the Stalin-worshipping Saddam Hussein, was planning to fall on Iran, to make himself master of the whole region. Meanwhile, the Americans, under the feeble Carter, seemed to be fair game, and their diplomatic staff in Teheran were taken hostage by a mob of angry students; in spring 1980 a pathetic attempt was made to rescue them by helicopter mission, which went wrong in classic Bay of Pigs style, with sand blocking the engines, and machines crashing into each other. Old men in Moscow chuckled, and moved into Afghanistan.

The last act of the USSR began very professionally, with a mixture of brute force and low cunning. On Christmas Eve, 1979, Soviet troops took over the airport at Kabul, and three days later six Soviet divisions crossed the border. The rulers of Afghanistan knew that power was precarious, and in 1979 the Tadj-Bek palace in Kabul was very well guarded — 2,500 special troops, dug-in tanks and a private guard consisting of relatives of the president. President Hafizullah Amin had himself seized power a few months before, in a coup, and had called in a special Soviet force of 500 men to complete the security system. It had been recruited among Central Asians wearing a uniform that made them resemble local, Afghan, forces. But they were in fact from the KGB and Spetsnaz, its ‘special purpose’ troops, men (Uzbeks and Tadzhiks) trained to the highest degree of physical fitness. Amin never thought that they would be a threat. He was quite wrong: there had been 343 flights into Kabul in forty-eight hours and their mission was in fact to overthrow him.

The affair was, militarily, very well prepared. The palace had been studied with a view to assault, but much care was taken to disguise the Soviet intent. The night before, the Soviet forces attended a banquet with the Afghan defenders. President Amin was extremely careful as to what he ate, but he did trust his own cooks, who were Soviet Uzbeks. On 26 December 1979, in the middle of the dinner, all who had touched the food began to roll around in extreme pain. Soviet doctors were summoned, and revived Amin with injections and a drip-feed. But they were soon followed by Soviet assault troops, who blasted their way, with foul language, through the defences, hurling grenades into the private rooms and even the lifts. Amin wrenched himself from his bed, and, in his underwear, with tubes dangling from his body, went down to the main hall to see what was happening. His five-year-old son, crying, rushed up to him, clutching his father’s legs. One of the Soviet doctors said, ‘I can’t look at this.’ Amin was killed shortly afterwards. The affair was all over by midnight, and at 12.30 a.m. on 28 December, a telephone call came through to the new Afghan leader, Babrak Karmal, from the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. Soviet troops were coming in to reinforce Karmal’s position. They were already in control of the airports and the main roads into Kabul, the capital. All very easy: but in the next twelve years Afghanistan was wrecked as a country, and so, too, was the Soviet Union itself. Almost no-one in a senior position in Moscow seems to have recognized that this would happen. On the contrary, the decision to invade Afghanistan was taken quite casually, and was hardly even minuted. Old Brezhnev, Andropov and the senior military simply went into ‘country A’, as it was called. Other Politburo signatures, willing or unwilling, were collected afterwards.

They thought that they had the measure, not just of Afghanistan, but of Central Asia in general. The whole area was very backward, and when the Russian Revolution happened, the Bolsheviks found that they could rely on some elements within the Islamic world, including even the Chechens in the northern part of the Caucasus. The USSR was progress. It freed the education system from obsolete nonsense — a teacher who did not know Arabic (let alone early medieval Arabic) forcing, with terrible punishments, rote-learning of the Koran on small boys who had no notion of what they were having to memorize. Women were emancipated, and local languages were given some encouragement; customs such as month-long fasting, or circumcision, were discouraged (or worse). It was true that, as time went by, Moscow found itself relying on local power-wielders. The tribal system was tenacious, and there were also religious orders (Sufi) with a leader, Sheikh, who exercised a great deal of informal authority. When, after Khrushchev, the Russians started to deal through locals rather than Russians, these informal networks came into their own, together with a corruption that oiled the wheels. When the USSR finally collapsed, the last generation of Communist bosses quite easily took on national dress, and religion, to become presidents of the new Central Asian republics. At any rate, no-one in Moscow seems to have thought that running Afghanistan would be especially difficult. As regards her foreign affairs, the country was a sort of Asiatic Finland. Her ruler had been grateful for support against the British, and had recognized the Bolsheviks early on. He then initiated a modernization drive not unlike Atatürk’s in Turkey, and since the USSR was also modernizing backward Central Asian tribal peoples, there was much over which to collaborate. In the sixties aid came from the USSR, the usual cement and chemical works, and a gas pipeline took two thirds of Afghan natural gas to the north.

Even its considerable internal problems were familiar, in the sense that, with every Islamic society, you feel you are dealing with the same pack of cards, though the distribution of suits and honour cards greatly varies. Here, in a population of 15 million, modernization brought about the usual troubles. There was a Persian-speaking upper class, which was eroded by population growth and the de — localization of politics. Women’s emancipation in a Sunni Islam context of, in places, considerable conservatism was not straightforward: in Herat the men used henna as make-up (the Turkish slang for ‘homosexual’ is pusht, from ‘Pushtun’, the more accurate version of the English ‘Pathan’, the dominant group) and the women had to wear the clumsy burka, which hardly showed even their eyes. There were troubles between Pathans, semi-Iranian Baluchis and Turkic Uzbeks of the north, each with a different language; tribal matters counted as well, and even divided the Communists (the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set up in 1965) into two rival groups. There were also secular army officers who sympathized with Moscow, where many of them had been trained, and despised the native traditions. The party in effect depended upon university students, the intelligentsia and some administrators for its membership, and these, vain and isolated from society at large, split. On top of everything else, the Pathans were not confined to Afghanistan. In 1947, when Pakistan was established, 6 million of them lived there, and accounted for several Pakistani leaders; there was agitation for a ‘Pushtunistan’ that would have caused secession, and the Pakistanis tried to control their neighbour’s affairs. Militarily speaking, Afghanistan was so mountainous that only a genius could conquer it; the northern and southern parts were even cut off from each other until a great tunnel was driven through, at 12,000 feet, in 1964, with Soviet aid, to connect them in winter.

Once this happened, politics became less local, and factions contended for central power. A famine in 1972, and a supposedly shameful treaty with Iran, brought discontent, and while the monarch was abroad, he was overthrown, by a ‘modernizer’, Mohammed Dowd, with help from two factions of Communists in the wings. Dowd proceeded with modernization, on the whole leaning towards the USSR in much the same way as other ‘Third World’ leaders of the era. As happened in Iran, Islamists began to surface as political opposition in the 1970s, and were driven abroad. To lessen his dependence on the Communists, Dowd took a loan from Iran, and this prompted Moscow to connive in his overthrow. One of the Communist factions, led by Nur Mohammed Taraki, a writer, seized power in 1978 and launched what was described as the ‘April [‘Saur’] revolution’. It was strongly anti-religious, and there was cruel persecution; the prisons, hideous, were full, with 27,000 deaths, by official figures, in one of them alone (the governor said that, in order to set up socialism, he would leave, if necessary, only a million Afghanis alive, as that number would suffice for its construction). Agrarian reform was launched, and neglected the all-important matter of access to water, which was controlled by the village elders. It also took land from religious foundations (as the Shah had done) and tribal chieftains.

The party itself split, and, true to form, the rival Communist leader, Babrak Karmal, much grander in social origin, and from a different clan, was packed off to Prague as ambassador (where he was kept in waiting as Moscow’s man). In the short term, a Communist regime could indeed manage to suppress Islam, because Islam lacked an international organization (such as the Vatican) and would only manage a united front of resistance if forced to. It was forced to. Herat rebelled, despite savage repression and 100,000 killings. Meanwhile, the Pakistanis were giving training in guerrilla warfare to Islamists who had taken refuge there: that way, they could control ‘Pushtunistan’ agitation. In other words, complications within complications, and not a place to invade.

Nevertheless, Soviet clients were in trouble, and the problem landed on Brezhnev’s desk. Taraki appealed for help to Moscow. To start with, he met reluctance, and was told on the telephone that direct intervention was not possible. Kosygin showed how much the Politburo understood the situation when he said, ‘Could you not recruit from among the working class?’ and had the apposite answer, ‘I am afraid that there is not much of a working class in Afghanistan.’ Taraki was sent a hundred barrels of incendiary liquid. However, the men of experience, Andropov for the KGB and Gromyko for the foreign ministry, warned against any direct intervention. Without intervention, Taraki himself soon lost control, and was overthrown after barely a year, in September 1978, by Hafizullah Amin, a rival who had been trained in the USA, latterly at Columbia. Taraki was tied down to a bed and suffocated with a cushion; Brezhnev is said to have broken down in tears when he heard. But in any event Amin had been rebellious not just locally, but as far as the USSR was concerned: he had defied the advisers, and four of Taraki’s men had even had to be smuggled out via the Soviet embassy, in nailed-down boxes. Soon, Amin was sending ‘frantic’ messages for Pakistan to offer some support, as he knew that the Soviets were suspicious of him. That made them more suspicious still, since Pakistan entertained good relations with China. More atrocities followed — 12,000 of the most qualified people, under Taraki and then again under Amin. Amin then tried to mend fences with Islam, which Taraki had treated with contempt.

Moscow’s ‘Third World’ expansionism, very promising after the Americans’ defeat in Vietnam, was in any case considerable. There was now Soviet emplacement in Africa, particularly in Ethopia, on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula. The Americans’ ally, the Shah, had fallen early in 1979, as had Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua a little later; there was even a proto-Cuba forming up in tiny Grenada. Besides, the Carter administration in Washington generally invited contempt. It had lost the way over ‘human rights’, denouncing South Africa and Chile rather than the Soviet Union; its economic performance was woeful; the German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, looked on Carter with derision. American Intelligence did not even notice Soviet troop concentrations a month before the invasion; nor did it understand the significance of the occupation specialist General Ivan Pavlovsky’s transfer to Kabul. From Moscow’s viewpoint, it was an obvious opportunity — get rid of a few obscurantist clerics, as had been done before in Communist history, and show who was boss. There was the usual puppet for such occasions — Babrak Karmal (a pseudonym, meaning ‘people’s flag’, though he was of tribal leadership stock), who was prepared for some kind of accommodation with Islam, though himself a whisky drinker. After the Christmas slaughter in the Tadj-Bek palace, he was installed as president, with instructions to behave with moderation.

It was the start of a long nightmare, a war that, for the Soviets, turned out to be unwinnable. In the first place, the American reaction was much harsher than Moscow had supposed: not just sanctions of various sorts, including a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, which Brezhnev had planned as a showcase of Soviet professionalism, but non-ratification of SALT II, a resumption of the arms race, and the adoption of a strategic partnership with Pakistan. This was dangerous territory. Pakistan was pioneering a nuclear bomb, in pursuit of her troubles with India, Moscow’s ally in the area. But there were also Islamic elements, some of which had even burned down the American embassy just before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Saudis (and various other Islamic states) condemned the USSR, and sent help to Pakistan; to its subsequent regret, the USA then gave training and help to the Islamic element. The USSR was isolated, and could not even sway the UN, which, apart from Greece and a few other countries, offered overwhelming condemnation. A few Europeans demurred, saying that militant Islam was worse than Communism, but Brezhnev’s blundering meant that they had no real influence.

There was unquestionably much to be said for what the Soviets were trying to do: the dead, irrational world of small-town and tribal Islam, with its endless children, its terrible oppression of women, and its hostility to minorities, needed to be escaped from. However, the battling had already caused disruption, and in the Amin period there had been devastating disruption — 100,000 deaths and 500,000 refugees. History showed decisively that Afghans united against foreign invasion, if on nothing else. Maybe if the country had been isolated, resistance would have been destroyed, as had happened in Central Asia. But Afghanistan bordered on Iran and Pakistan, and mountains made connections over the border impossible for the Soviets — they had 100,000 men only — to control. Seven Sunni Islam resistance groups supported from Pakistan emerged, and so did eight separate Shia Islamic ones based on Iran — forces numbering up to 200,000 men. In the old days, Islamic resistance to European empires had been hopelessly weak (except in the case of Turkey) because it had no base at all in technology. Now, technology was well within reach. Trotsky had said that Stalin had been ‘Genghiz Khan with a telephone’. Communism came to an end, at least in part, because the real modern-day Genghiz Khans had an understanding of surface-to-air missiles.

The Soviets could only really control about one fifth of the country, and the Afghan army was unreliable, to the point not just of mass desertion, but of having to be deprived of weapons that might be sold to the resistance. Karmal tried through amnesties, licensing of private trade and greater tolerance for religion to make himself popular, but the regime remained as ever divided, and some of its members (including the foreign minister) were identified as Soviet agents: most things were done by the thousands of Soviet advisers attached in this or that capacity. The Soviets themselves became involved in smuggling of the Western goods that were available in Kabul, and the corruption affected the PDPA. The Soviet forces were hated, and there were atrocities (a captured prisoner might be ‘under-shirted’, i.e. his skin slit around the middle of his body, and then lifted off, over his head). The troops could only move about in large numbers. They responded to resistance with tremendous and unscrupulous force — a hundred peasants routinely burned in an irrigation channel where they were taking refuge, and the like; air-dropped landmines caused mayhem; 12,000 corpses were discovered in mass graves in the main prison, Pol-e-Charki. The Soviet 100,000 became 600,000, and the war caused 80 per cent of the educated Afghans to flee the country, by 1982. Kabul itself trebled in population, and by 1989 over two thirds of children admitted to hospital were suffering from malnutrition. Even in 1980 there were a million refugees, and by 1984 4 million, with perhaps another 2 million who had been uprooted in their own country, quite apart from the perhaps 2 million who were killed — out of a population of 15 million. There had been a supposed Afghan army on the Soviet side, perhaps 80,000 men, but 50,000 deserted in 1980. An atmosphere of sheer hatred developed, with the sort of self-sacrificial attitude that had animated the Vietcong, and it began to affect the Central Asians (Tadzhiks) whom the Soviets used: they were replaced by young men from the Baltic republics, whose enthusiasm for the Soviet Union was not increased thereby. In this atmosphere, the Soviets could control Kabul but hardly anywhere else, beyond highways that needed to be very intensively patrolled. They got rid of Karmal in 1986, not long after the 27th Moscow Congress, replacing him with a Mohammed Najibullah, who had been head of the Afghan equivalent of the KGB, the KHAD (his brother boasted that he had signed 90,000 death warrants), and, in a strange echo of the Greek civil war, 30,000 children aged between six and fourteen were sent to Moscow.

But the Afghan resistance did not diminish. Rather, it grew more difficult, more anarchic, more inclined, even, to fight among itself. It was based on Pakistan and Iran, the latter maintaining Shia rebels, while in Pakistan there were 380 ‘refugee tented villages’ which maybe had the highest birth rate in the world. The seven resistance groups did not easily collaborate, and the fiercest, Hezb (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar), did not co-operate at all: it was, especially, at odds with the other chief resistance group, Massoud’s Jamiat in the Panjshir valley, and religious or tribal emphases played their part, Pakistan insisting on some sort of alliance. The Shias, with Iranian support, were not involved, and themselves were divided. But money was involved: opium from Afghanistan and the frontier areas of Pakistan supplied, in 1981-2, half of the heroin reaching the West. This is a dimension yet to be explored — or, rather, there is a serious question, as to how far the Americans were encouraging both what they later called ‘fundamentalist Islam’ and the drug trade. The CIA had been prevented, by Congress, from getting what it thought to be proper money. Why not do drugs, through Islamists who did not mind corrupting further a Christian youth whom they already regarded with contempt? At any rate, the Afghan resistance flourished, and in 1986 the Americans were giving it Stinger missiles — missiles that enabled men on mountainsides to knock out Soviet helicopters. They were brought in through Pakistan, and there was almost nothing that Moscow could do against this. The president of Pakistan himself was murdered, no doubt at Soviet behest, but this made no difference. The USSR had met its match. Thirty thousand Soviet soldiers were killed out of some 600,000 combatants — nothing, in comparison with what had happened on the Afghan side, but a vast amount, in terms of Soviet prestige.

Just as the Russians were moving into Afghanistan, and the Teheran students humiliated the American diplomats, there was a great change going on in the Atlantic world. Its origins went back to 1975, and can even be pinpointed to the Rambouillet meeting of November, that year. Disillusion with the post-war orthodoxies was growing; more and more people now thought that the answer must be to change them. Inflation? An unmitigatedly bad thing, rewarding vice and punishing virtue. Development aid? Theft. Détente? A lie. OPEC? Blackmailers. It was time to go back to the older scheme of things, of right and wrong, black and white. A little before the Rambouillet meeting, there had been a symbolic change in London: the Conservative Party disposed of its failed leader, Edward Heath, and replaced him with Margaret Thatcher. In America the old Goldwater Republicanism emerged in strength, with a new leader altogether, Ronald Reagan.

I had my own spear-carrying experience of events in Czechoslovakia, spending three months in prison in circumstances that turned out to be quite revealing. I had gone to Vienna in 1963, on a scholarship from Cambridge, to study in the military archives. At the time, Hungary had begun to open up, and there was a month-long language school at Debrecen, where I took up with an East German girl. She had ideas of getting married and escaping to the West, and relations were not brilliant. Neither was Vienna: I spent my evenings more or less kicking a tin past the whores down the Kärntnerstrasse, though there was something to be had from one Christopher Lazare, one-time lover of Klaus Mann and author of one of the greatest book review opening lines ever: ‘John Steinbeck is an inverted Aesop; he uses human beings to illustrate animal truths.’ I had had a landlady from the Banat, who used to stir her enormous bloomers in the jam pan, and disagreed violently with me as to whether, when you cut your fingernails, the bits needed to fly off at unpredictable angles: we parted company acrimoniously, and through a Croat friend I found a splendid pair of sisters who looked after me. But it was not lively, and the next day’s newspapers were sold around 6.30 p.m., when the café waiters started looking at their watches. Lazare used to eye them and ask whether, perchance, they had the newspapers of the day after tomorrow. Budapest, even then, was more fun if you knew where to go, and I had been taken round by Adam Rez, a collaborating figure like the baron in Bulgakov, who was kindly, whereas I was hopelessly naïve: si jeunesse savait. In February 1964 I went there by train, and there followed a set of events that would be entirely familiar to anyone knowing the history of central Europe in the twentieth century (a very good introduction is Kafka’s Amerika, which is not about America at all: the whole book is a Vienna hotel). In the carriage was a Togolese studying agronomy in Romania. He had problems with the customs, and I endeavoured to translate (‘fekete ember’, etc.) as his French was all right. He had got talking to a Flemish Belgian. The Belgian opened the corridor door to a fur-coated female presence, Andrea Walder, in French. I joined the conversation, and we found things in common. She pronounced the Hungarian place names — Szekesfehérvár, etc. — correctly and I asked, sensibly, was she an academic or a journalist. She replied, ‘Je suis journaliste.’ ‘De quel journal?’ ‘Vous connaissez le Daily Express, de Londres?’ She did seven languages perfectly, and the only mistake I ever heard her make in English (she said ‘insist to’ with an infinitive rather than ‘insist on’ with a gerund: a tricky one, because all other languages do a ‘for’ with a subjunctive) was itself a bright one. She had the grand manner, could march up to any Ritz desk, order a suite, make a few telephone calls, and run away from the bill to another Ritz. Anyway I was quite bowled over. Arriving at the Eastern Station in Budapest, she introduced me to Tibor Karman, whom she described as her fiancé, and we had dinner somewhere grand (it was Communist Hungary, and the great boulevards of nineteenth-century Pest were very dimly lit, with no life at all except for sporadic uninviting shop windows, but there were still grand restaurants).

Tibor, as she presented the case, had had a horrible time. Karman is a name to conjure with, as I later discovered: one of them set up the Minta (‘Model’, meaning Teachers’ Training) school, and his son was one of the two dozen Hungarian Nobels (it is a tribute to the relationship of Hungary and the Jews that an abnormally high percentage of Hungarian Nobels were non-Jewish, namely 17.5 per cent). As I remember it, Andrea told me that Tibor’s family had had rubber plantations in Indonesia, which is quite credible. They had met, she said, during the war. Her father was a (hugely tall) Transylvanian nobleman, her mother a Viennese Jewess, and owner of a sanatorium on the Semmering, a fresh-air place for ailments, south of Vienna. The father had got the honorary consul-generalship of Monaco, and therefore flew a large neutral flag from the block on a Pest boulevard. There, when the Nazis started attacking Jews, they stuffed the house, and the Karmans must have belonged to their set. Tibor stayed there during the siege of 1945, when old Hungary collapsed. Communists took over, and were no more friends of the Rózsadomb Jews than the Nazis had been. He was then, she said, imprisoned by the Communists and tortured. There were nasty marks on his back. He had been held in Szolnok, and therefore not released in 1956, because it was under Russian control, but he had met János Kádár in prison, and played chess with him, and Kádár had let him out. Then he had been given the sort of job — hospital portering — that released prisoners got. He had, in the evenings, betaken himself to old haunts, the Grand Hotel on the Margaret Island, where the barmen and the waiters were all part of old Hungary. Foreign journalists ended up there. Andrea, escaping from writs from the Ritz, ended up there as well, reporting for RIAS in Berlin (the Daily Express was I suspect something of a fantasy, but she had had some sort of affair with a married English peer in London, whose photograph, of him on a horse, she kept by her bedside). She and Tibor met in that red plush and gold bar. It was Ortrud and Telramund. There was money, once the West was reached. The West Germans were offering compensation for the horrors of 1944. More: there was a Herr Generaldirektor in Vienna to whom, as an SS officer, the Karmans had entrusted property, in particular some Dutch paintings, and he had deposited them for safe-keeping in the national bank of the then Independent State of Croatia, in Zagreb. That Herr Generaldirektor would have some explaining to do. They would get married. They went to the Hungarian government and asked for an exit visa — refused. What they needed was a useful idiot, der Geist, der stets bejaht. And she met me on that train.

It was not a good moment in my existence. Someone said that you can only do central Europe if you are very young or very old, and I was getting beyond my first youth. More, I had written an article in History Today, and Peter Quennell had been very encouraging, though the article — it was about the Habsburg army — was probably romantic tosh (the Austrian army is a very good subject, to which, now old, I would very willingly return: anything that knocks provincial nationalism on the head is a good thing). Out of the blue in Vienna came a letter signed Michael Sissons, of the literary agency A. D. Peters, the authors of whom represented a roll-call of English literature. It said that Hodder and Stoughton wished to publish a history of the twentieth century, and would I take care of the bit up to, as I remember, 1930. Five hundred pounds on signature, $5,000 to follow — huge sums. Tail wagging, I had asked Jack Plumb, who was enormously helpful to young men, what to do, given the obvious difficulty of combining proper respect for scholarship with etc. He said take it. I did, and the signing ceremony was witnessed by the Hodder grandees — the Attenborough dynasty — with a certain amount of disbelief. They were right. Back in Vienna, I went down to the British Council library in the Harrach Palace and took out Churchill’s speeches of the war, which moved me to tears. Then I took E. H. Carr’s three-volume Russian Revolution and started to take close, handwritten notes, which took weeks (it is a very boring and even silly book). Poor old Hodder and Stoughton were not going to flourish, as I plodded through Carr’s account of the problems of the Mensheviks with the trade unions, one packet of Senior Service untipped after the other, and tins kicked down the Kärtnerstrasse. I was an idiot.

But useful. Andrea and I met in Vienna, in a hotel near the Franz-Josephs Bahnhof. She did not tell me about the portable property in Zagreb, and it was all presented on an emotional level: ‘I knew the British would not refuse.’ It also all seemed quite easy. There had been a well-dramatized affair in Berlin, where someone had been squeezed into the dicky-box of a low-slung Karmann (coincidental) Ghia sports car and driven below the bar at Checkpoint Charlie, on the Friedrich-strasse in Berlin. The driver had got through the first barrier in the usual way, showing his passport, and had driven in second gear through the barbed wire towards the final barrier, then revved up quite suddenly, and driven under the boom. Could I hire a Karmann Ghia, and we would squeeze Tibor into the boot? There was a twist. It would not be the Austro-Hungarian border, but the Czechoslovak. At that moment, the first drips of the thaw were coming off the ice, and there had been a deal, to earn Austrian money, on the Czechoslovak side. From Vienna, you could go for the weekend to Bratislava, the main town in Slovakia, and so close to Vienna that, in the old days, there had been a connection so easy that you could go for the night to the Vienna Opera and be back afterwards. No visa was needed, nor was one needed from Hungary, such that Austro-Hungarian encounters took place in Bratislava. All depended upon the car.

I could not drive. However, there was someone who could, called Jan Wilson. She was Australian, and had come to teach in the English school in Vienna, an outfit that had been opened up in Heiligenstadt, near the Beethoven House (there were, as it turned out, forty-seven of those, because landladies turned up screeching about dog’s hair when he was in the middle of a sonata). It was run by a Lancastrian, who had been a sergeant and had married an Austrian; he spoke Lancastrian Viennese (‘Righty-oh, ’nabend’). Waifs and strays turned up, and I was teaching French to waifs and strays, some of whom — as happens, bizarrely, with these odd schools, like Russell’s — went on to great things. I taught a Count Gudenus who now owns much of Guatemala, for instance, and whose ears I boxed almost mortally. Jan Wilson was, like me, hanging around, and wondering what on earth life was about. When I asked her to drive, she said yes with alacrity. I went down to a car-hire place, Liewers, on the Triester Strasse, and politely asked whether they had a Karmann Ghia. They did not, but there was a Volkswagen 1500, a car not very large — in fact, the classic symbol of the Wirtschaftswunder. We drove off, past these huge villas in Heiligenstadt where once Richard Cobb had wept and sung. When he was very young, in about 1934, his mother had packed him off on a Quaker network to learn German, and he had found himself in the Heiligenstadt villa of one Felix Saltén, a Budapest Jew and the creator of Bambi. He and his wife did not have a relationship of pure love, and she took it out on the young Richard, who spent his time in the back kitchen eating bread and dripping — the fat of fat — with the maid. His mother had given him pamphlets to distribute to the working-class quarters of Vienna, telling people where, in Czechoslovakia, they could get help. Round Richard went, and was picked up by the police. Men in loden coats, hats with a feather in them, dragged him, kicking, the length of the Ottakringer Hauptstrasse and he said later on that what he had remembered from it all was the huge-faced women, fox-fur-eyed, holding their heads in their hands and just staring out of the double-glazed window. To accommodate the habit, there was even a little hollow built into the window sill, holding the elbows that held the head, so that it could stare. Then he was expelled, the first and not the last time in that very remarkable life. We drove past the Saltén house, and got on our way past Hainburg, where, in 1889, the Austrian Social Democrats had launched their bid for the future, which turned out so tragically wrong. The scene was of course central Europe in Prisoner of Zenda mode, and we went through the Slovak border without difficulty. Hotel Devin, Tibor, dinner, what do we do next?

It was clear to one and all that this was not on. The car was absurdly small, the frontier obstacles serious. Next day, we trundled round the countryside, and it is an interesting area, as I later learned. The Csállókőz (Vel’ky Žitný ostrov in Slovak), an island in the Danube, had once had German villages, filled with harmless people (whom I later encountered, speaking a mixture of Hungarian and German, in Nassau). A scene of desolation in the snow (‘Dieses Dorf hiess seinerzeit Modern,’ said Tibor). None of us had quite the courage to say that this was preposterous. Tibor lay down on the back and Andrea put a coat over him; she then sat upon him, and rehearsed a line to the effect that she was suffering from an inflamation of the ovaries — Eierstockentzündung — which she thought would defeat the Slovak frontier guards. We then approached the frontier. It was the ides of March, 1964. So many people had that same experience — deep snow, barbed wire, guards in long coats with long rifles and red stars in uniform caps, barking Alsatians. The first barrier opened up, and we were in a column of cars going back to Vienna, which Andrea had banked on. Second barrier. Andrea had expected that there would be one guard, who would probably just have waved us through — the Slovaks’ instincts are decent — but, the authorities knowing what they were doing, there were several. One looked into the back of the car, and wondered. Andrea said, ‘Eierstockentzündung’. A hand went to the coat underneath, and hair was obvious. ‘Sie chaben eine vierte Perzzoon in diesem Wagen.’ I said to Andrea that there was no point in contesting it, and we were all led towards the customs building. Tibor stood shoeless in the snow, and bit his fingernails to the quick: he knew what would have happened otherwise, as sticks went under them. There was an interrogation that night, all of us in separate rooms. Morning came, and the customs people — decent Slovaks: I heard them say about me, ‘Simpatický’ — rang up the Czech Ministry of Justice people in Prague. The Czech Ministry of Justice people in Prague were pigs, insisted on rules, and so we were stuck. A police car took Jan and me to the prison, the Prokurátorská väznica v Bratislave. We stopped on the way, at a café, and they gave us an enormous slivovica. Then the prison gates opened, and the formalities started: belongings handed over, medical inspection, prison clothes put on — a brown number, smelling (I can recall it now) of washing, with flat shoes that you cannot run in. You go along the corridors, and if there is another prisoner coming, you are turned, face to the wall, until he has passed. Warders click keys to warn each other that they are coming. Then a cell — it was 283, and I later went back, post-Communism, Monte Cristo fashion, to see it, to wonder if the inmates needed some cigarettes. The cell then contained four young men, and I complained to the governor that the cell was too small for that number. He agreed, but said, what could he do? They were gypsies. In the old days, the gypsies used to get themselves put into prison in November, because they were fed and heated. Now there was a free market, and it was September. There was therefore overcrowding in the Prokurátorská väznica v Bratislave. I could not criticize, and wandered down that well-known staircase reciting the St Matthew Passion, which, somehow, I knew by heart: Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, so scheid’ Du nicht von mir, in the old Klemperer version. I thought of my poor old mother, a war widow, with me as the only child — my father had been killed in the RAF in ’42 — and what she must be feeling. Your first week in prison is awful, and the chap they had moved in with me was very sympathetic as I wiped away the tears that were not entirely to be stifled. He was quite an interesting lad, Kornel Karpacky by name. Our common language was Hungarian. The authorities let me have the grammar book I had arrived with, Banhidi-Jókai-Szabó, Tanuljuk nyelveket, and I had reached lesson ten, where they explain that the verb changes according to whether it is transitive or intransitive followed by an indirect article or a dative. The translation passages were about a Palestinian going round a textile factory. At that time, the second language in Bratislava was Hungarian. It had been the second capital, until 1918, and the Jews, a quarter of the population, had spoken Hungarian; there were also Germans who had taken to it easily enough. Kornel spoke it, with a thick Slovak accent which I myself have never, to this day, entirely lost, because his mother had come from Transylvania and his father was Slovak. He explained that life had been very difficult, that he had made three of the local girls pregnant, had had three mothers chasing after him, had made for the frontier with wire-cutters. I should not have believed this, because Kornel — who was not I think entirely balanced in mind — must have been that phenomenon of Communist prisons that everyone knows, a Spitzel — someone planted to find out what you are about. He did not get anything much out of me, and must have got quite sick of the St Matthew (I also knew the Verdi Requiem). At some stage, he must have been told to try a homosexual approach. The prison pants came down, and a foot-long Pan-Slav number stretched before my eyes. On it had been tattooed the badge of Fascist Slovakia, some sort of double-headed lobster. I expressed no interest, and there we were. The weeks went by. I got to know the guards. The librarian, who had good German, trundled round his books, and I said, ‘Seitdem ich hier sitze, kann ich nicht umhin, Das Kapital zu lesen’, which I then did. H. G. Wells was not really any better, though, in later life, I would gladly read both of these men, especially Wells. Forty years later, Penguin asked me to do an introduction to his Short History of the World, a superb performance, and he is the writer whom I should want to recall from the dead. He competes with Orwell, but Orwell never dies.

The warders became friendly. ‘Mész haza,’ they said — you’ll go home. One had served in a Slovak outfit in Italy at the end of the war, and spoke at bit of Italian, which I vaguely could manage: ‘piove’, in the exercise yard, where we went every day for half an hour, balancing on an isosceles triangle of half-thawed ice, and if you stood on one end, the other, thirty yards up, rose. Then it was back to the cell, warders clicking their keys, to warn each other that a prisoner was coming. The food was some sort of stew, pushed through a flap. Later on, one of the judges asked me, why did you never complain about the food, and I said, not to his enlightenment, have you ever lived in a Cambridge college? I was not wasting my time, and the British went into action. The Consul-General in Prague, Ramsay Melhuish, turned up with several hundred untipped State Express, which I shared with Kornel, who, Slovak nationalist that he was, said that they were inferior to his own Lipa brand, the tobacco of which was so carelessly packed that the whole thing caught fire and was therefore easier to smoke. Melhuish also gave me all the works of Bertrand Russell when, in alimony mode, he wrote books called ‘Power’, ‘Being’, etc. We used to talk about the lectures of A. J. P. Taylor in the governor’s office, and he was very kind to my mother, whom he put up in the Thun Palace in Prague. She was, I am afraid, difficult, and he was wonderful. She came: there was nothing to be said but the prison governor took the point. At a certain point, in my cell, I heard the clumping of boots. It was the governor. He said something like:

No more E. H. Carr in the Palais Harrach: instead, I said I would write a book about the eastern front in the First World War, signed the contract, and ten years later, wrote it.

It came to a trial. Neither the Czechoslovak nor the Hungarian KGB could work it out. Was I some kind of deep agent? Three months went by. I had a defence lawyer, Edgar Prisender, who turned out to be an enormously interesting man. He was the grandson of a Habsburg major-general, was, somewhere along the line, Jewish, and sprang from a family of Hungarian landowners in Slovakia. His French was near perfect (I gave him Proust, though that would not have been his cup of tea) and he had acquired decent English as well. He kept me going with vitamins — kohlrabi, a vegetable that I had not known — and came every week. I was all right, not wasting my time, but Jan Wilson had a far harder experience. She had been banged up with a gypsy prostitute, and had no language at all in common; she had stopped menstruating, and she did not have the support from family that I had. We met in Sydney much later, where she ran a market garden; never a word of reproach. I went to Australia in 1978, and would have stayed, except that it is so very far away. Jan, who was without friends and family, and did not speak the languages, behaved like a brick.

The trial was interesting. There was nothing much in the world news at the time, and they piled in. In the spectators’ box were an RAF war widow, and a woman who had lost her family in Auschwitz, Andrea’s mother. The interpreter — it all had to go through English, Slovak and Hungarian — was also from Auschwitz: he told me he had come out weighing 60 pounds. The judges had been fixed in advance by Edgar Prisender. They would trap the old Stalinist public prosecutor into making a fool of himself. They did. He was stupid enough to demand the maximum sentence against me and Jan, who were obvious innocents, and the minimum against the principals, Andrea and Tibor. Even then, they got six months — nothing, in terms of that system (an old Austrian woman had got nine years in Pardubice a few weeks before). Jan and I got a month, and were expelled from the country on 8 June. The Czechs — not the Slovaks — were absurdly bureaucratic, and when I wanted to take my baby son, in 1983, to see his godmother were vindictive. It needed an intervention by the Foreign Office for me to be put into a Helsinki basket.

The upshot, and the meaning, of that trial was that the public prosecutor was made to look foolish, and was got rid of. The Slovak judges rose in the land. So did Edgar Prisender. We had got on very well indeed, and I went to see a wonderful Hungarian cousin of his in Vienna afterwards, who told me, come 1968, that Edgar had been named Czechoslovak ambassador to the USA in August 1968, just before the Soviet invasion. Edgar denies this. But he escaped in 1968 and became an international patent lawyer for Ciba-Geigy in Basle. They should have made him president of Slovakia, as a prelude to the country’s rejoining Hungary in a confederation. Andrea and Tibor had a different fate. The affair had obviously been embarrassing and ridiculous. The Czechs meanly made both of them serve the other few weeks of their sentences in Pakrac prison in Prague. Then they were expelled, and I met Andrea as she came over. Tibor was received with flowers and apologies by the Hungarian secret police at Komárom. Then the Austrian government went into action, and Tibor was shoved over the border at Hegyeshalom without a passport. They got married. Then they approached the SS Herr Generaldirektor and got nowhere. However, there were the Karman paintings, deposited in the Fascist Bank of Croatia, and a deal was done: a villa on the Dalmatian coast, in return for the de Hoochs (were they even genuine?). What happened? I have taught a prime minister of Hungary, and the brother of one of his cabinet ministers took me into Transylvania when Romania collapsed. The Slovak interior minister arranged for me to visit my old cell, number 283, in 1992, and I marched up the prison steps remembering those lines, Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, so scheid’ Du nicht von mir. I was very near tears. I still do not know what it was about: central Europe. But I did my stuff for the growth of Slovakia, and that has turned out quite well.