by Tony Judt
181 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.
182 Novotný was not the only one afraid of a backlash. On April 5th 1963, the Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti secretly wrote to ask Novotný and his colleagues to delay news of the rehabilitation of Slánský 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.
183 In December 1967 Party members constituted 16.9 percent of the Czechoslovak population—the highest share of any Communist state.
184 Jiří Pelikán, ed., The Czechoslovak Political Trials. The Suppressed Report of the Dubček Government’s Commisson of Inquiry, 1968 (Stanford, 1971), p. 17.
185 The request was hardly spontaneous. Two weeks earlier—at a secret meeting near Lake Balaton in Hungary hosted by János Kádár—Vasil Bil’ak (one of Dubček’s opponents within the Czechoslovak Party leadership) was advised by Shelest that Moscow would like a ‘letter of invitation’. The ensuing letter refers explicitly to the Party’s ‘loss of control’, the likelihood of a ‘counter-revolutionary coup’ and the ‘risks to socialism’ before inviting Moscow’s ‘intervention and all round assistance’. It ends: ‘we request that you treat our statement with the utmost secrecy, and for that reason we are writing to you, personally, in Russian.’
186 Because Ceauşescu refused to take part in the invasion or allow Warsaw Pact troops to cross Romanian territory, the Bulgarian contingent had to be airlifted to Ukraine instead. Their presence hardly justified the trouble; but the importance of spreading responsibility for the attack across the largest possible number of fraternal states overrode other considerations.
187 After 1989 it emerged that the Czech Secret Police in the normalization years had established a special unit to monitor and target the country’s Jews: an echo of Czechoslovakia’s own past as well as contemporary Poland. It had not escaped the authorities’ notice that only one of Dubček’s leading colleagues had refused to sign the Moscow document renouncing his actions. He was František Kriegel—the only Jew in the group.
188 Milan Šimečka, Obnovení Pořádku (The Restoration of Order), (Bratislava, 1984—in samizdat). Eighty thousand Czechs and Slovaks fled into exile following the Soviet invasion.
189 The baby-boom generation itself never wanted for employment. It was its immediate successor, the cohort born after 1953, which entered the employment market just as jobs were getting harder to find. Not surprisingly, the politics of the successor generation were markedly different.
190 Only in Spain, where the cycle of social protest lasted into the mid-Seventies before blending into the movement for a return to parliamentary democracy, did the upheavals of the Sixties herald a genuine political transformation—a story to be taken up in Chapter 16.
191 Britain’s Profumo Affair of 1963—a deliciously multifaceted scandal of sex, class, drugs, race, politics and spies that absorbed the country for months—would have been unthinkable a few years later. The peccadilloes of a fallen élite might continue to arouse a certain prurient interest, but after the Sixties they could no longer shock.
192 The US federal budget deficit grew from $1.6 billion in 1965 to $25.2 billion in 1968.
193 As a point of comparison American oil imports, at the height of the 1973 crisis, represented no more than 36 percent of US domestic consumption.
194 An average, of course, is just an average. In the particularly bleak year of 1976, when British unemployment passed one million for the first time since the war and annual inflation approached 25 percent, rates of growth everywhere hit a low point—in Italy the national economy actually shrank, for the first time since the war.
195 National Association of Local Government Officers; National Union of Public Employees; Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs.
196 This acronym had a distinct political use: by reviving the name of an eighteenth-century French silver coin it helped assuage Parisian discomfort at having to acknowledge West Germany’s emerging primacy in the affairs of Europe.
197 Quoted in Harold James, International Monetary Cooperation since Bretton Woods (NY, Oxford, 1996), p. 180.
198 Most notoriously on October 17th 1961, when the French police murdered an estimated two hundred Algerians, many of them drowned in the Seine, following a protest march through Paris. The Chief of Police at the time was Maurice Papon, later indicted and found guilty of crimes against humanity for his collaboration in the wartime rounding up and despatch of French Jews to Auschwitz. See Epilogue.
199 The Provisionals took their name from the April 24th 1916 declaration in Dublin, when the insurrectionists proclaimed a provisional government.
200 It was estimated at the time that the cost of maintaining a British presence in Northern Ireland was £3 billion per annum, at a time when London was hard pushed to balance its budget.
201 The unimpeachably law-abiding French Socialist Party even formed a ‘Committee for the Defense of Human Rights’ in the Federal Republic, offering to provide expertise and practical help to defendants accused of terrorist acts there.
202 As in Germany, the police had actually found the leaders at one point, only to lose them again. Arrested in 1974, Renato Curcio escaped from prison in February 1975, only to be recaptured eleven months later.
203 Initially released, Negri was re-arrested in 1983. In June 1984 he was tried and condemned to thirty years in prison.
204 One such network, the infamous ‘P2 Lodge’, was a mysterious Masonic web of right-wing politicians, bankers, soldiers and policemen, organized by Licio Gelli, a former militant in Mussolini’s ‘Social Republic’ from 1943 to 1945. Its 962 members included thirty generals, eight admirals, forty-three parliamentary deputies, three active Cabinet Ministers and a fair cross-representation of the highest ranks of industry and the private banking sector.
205 West European punk left a particularly ugly aftertaste in the waning years of Communist Eastern Europe, where it was taken up by nihilistic underground bands cynically fastening on to a heritage of political and musical dissidence for their own ends. In a repellent blend of pornography and political incorrectness, the Spions, a Hungarian punk group of the Eighties, recorded ‘Anna Frank’: ‘A little forced intercourse before they come and take you away, Anna Frank! Make love to me! Anna Frank! Cry you bitch! Anna Frank! Otherwise I’ll give you up! Anna Frank—the boys are waiting for you.’
206 In Britain this trend could be traced to longstanding enthusiasms for vegetarianism, ‘authentic’ building and clothing materials and the like—often overlapping with networks of socialist societies and rambling clubs: the Left’s response to the hunting, shooting and fishing of the conservative set. In continental Europe the cultures of both Left and Right reflected a very different history. Whereas Britain’s Good Food Guide was founded and edited by Fabian socialists and presented from the outset as a contribution to class warfare on the gastronomic front, France’s Guide Michelin was always and only a commercial enterprise, albeit directed to much the same audience.
207 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.
208 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’.
209 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.
210 In the same years Moscow even funded the minuscule American Communist Party to the tune of $42 million, a revealing exercise in undiscriminating generosity.
211 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.
212 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.
213 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.
214 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.
215 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.
216 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.
217 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.
218 And to Costas Gavras’ influential 1969 film Z, based on the Lambrakis affair.
219 The officers, most of them formed in military cadet schools under the pre-war dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, were perhaps not as unpopular as their foreign critics asserted. But they were—rightly—presumed to have the sympathy (and perhaps more) of the United States. What was in essence a belated extension of the Greek civil war of the 1940s rapidly came instead to be seen as the latest cause célèbre in Europe’s century-old civil war. ‘Greece’ now replaced ‘Spain’ as the divining rod for polarized political sentiment.
220 Since 1962, Greece had ‘Associate’ status with the European Economic Community.
221 The junta itself, however, did not escape retribution. Eleven of its leaders were tried and convicted in August 1975. Three were given death sentences, later commuted to life in prison. Papadopoulos died in custody in 1999, unrepentant to the end. Brigadier-General Ioannidis was convicted at a later trial for his role in the suppression of the Polytechnic revolt. He remains in prison at the time of writing.
222 Maurras died in 1952, aged 84. Salazar himself, the son of an estate manager, was born in Vimeiro, Portugal, on April 28th 1889, just a week after Hitler. For a man still ruling a European state in the late 1960s he was unusually deeply rooted in the mores of the previous century—his mother was born in 1846.
223 By 1973, Western Europe accounted for two-thirds of Portugal’s imports and exports alike. 9The puritanical young officers and their left-wing allies were not, however, well-pleased with the subsequent outpouring of what they regarded as pornographic literature and films, as Portugal compensated for fifty years of cultural constriction. They even attempted at one point to ban the playing of fados, the traditional Portuguese folk songs: these, they felt, encouraged ‘bitterness and fatalism’ and were thus inimical to their goals of enlightenment and social progress.
224 As recently as 1963 the Spanish leader had not hesitated to execute a captured Communist, Juan Grimau, in defiance of widespread international criticism.
225 One ironic consequence of the carefully calibrated freedoms that Franco allowed to university activists in his last decade is that Spanish students of the Sixties generation typically exaggerate in retrospect the role they were to play in their country’s subsequent struggle for democracy.
226 See Chapter 7. As a result, Catholic leaders, unsullied by any Francoist past, were able to play an active role in the transition to democracy, serving as a ‘bridge’ between radicals and conservatives.
227 One month before it was declared legal, the PCE hosted in Madrid a public meeting of the Eurocommunist parties of Western Europe.
228 The socio-geographical breakdown of the 1977 vote was uncannily close to that of the elections of 1936—the country’s political culture had in effect been placed in cold storage for four decades. 15Article 151 of the Constitution offered ‘home rule’ to any region requesting it.
229 There were to be two further plots against king and parliament, in 1982 and 1985, both easily foiled.
230 By the mid-Eighties official unemployment data suggest that more than one in five of the working-age population was out of work. The real figure was probably closer to one in four. In a country still lacking a fully functioning social safety net and where few people had private savings, these figures indicate widespread hardship.
231 In 1982, the PSOE campaigned on the slogan ‘OTAN, de entrada no!’ Four years later, their posters read ‘OTAN, de entrada si!’
232 The traditional Socialist platform of nationalization hardly applied in Spain, where the authoritarian state already owned much of the official economy.
233 Spain’s new constitution of 1978, whose design was aimed above all at reconciling the antagonistic poles of Spanish history—Left/Right; Church/anti-clericals; center/periphery—was conspicuously silent about the regime it replaced.
234 His films—most recently La Mala educación (Bad Education, 2004)—were also quite pointedly anti-clerical; perhaps the one respect in which Almodóvar remains consistently faithful to an older tradition of Spanish cultural dissidence.
235 Victor Perez-Diaz, Spain at the Crossroads. Civil Society, Politics and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p.65
236 On both occasions the capital, Oslo, voted heavily in favor. But the decision was carried by an anti-European coalition of radicals, environmentalists, ‘linguistic nationalists’ and farmers from the country’s coastal and northern provinces, along with fishermen vehemently opposed to the EEC’s restriction of the exclusive coastal fishing zone to just twelve miles. Denmark’s entry also brought in Greenland, at the time still governed from Copenhagen. But after Greenland achieved self-rule in 1979, a referendum was called in which the country voted to leave the EEC, the only member-state ever to do so.
237 This was offset, however, by new investment opportunities for the private sector: the proportion of foreign-owned shares in Spanish companies rose 374 percent in the years 1983-1992.
238 More than one influential voice was raised in Brussels entreating the European Commission to call his bluff . . .
239 Of course the Common Agricultural Policy, the other major charge on the EU budget, had long had the effect of exacerbating the very regional distortions that the Cohesion Funds and others were now supposed to help eliminate . . .
24
0 Richer countries were typically less beholden to Brussels and maintained closer control of their affairs. In France, despite the ‘decentralization’ enshrined in laws passed during the 1980s, the reins of budgetary power stayed firmly in Parisian hands. As a result, prosperous regions of France followed the international trend and benefited from their EU links, but poor districts remained dependent on state aid above all.
241 The ‘Schengen zone’ has since been expanded to encompass other EU member states, but the UK has remained outside and France, among other participants, has reserved the right to re-impose border controls on security grounds.
242 Were it not for the distinctly upward curve of the birth rate in immigrant communities from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, the figures would have been even lower.
243 In Eastern Europe it was Hungary, where the ‘underground’ economy (see Chapter 18) furnished many people with a higher standard of living than elsewhere in the Bloc, which first reached comparably low birth-rates in these same years.
244 The highest level of resentful anger was to be found in the public service unions, covering underpaid government employees from dustmen to nurses. The major industrial unions were far more sanguine about Callaghan’s cuts: so long as Labour kept its promise to protect the traditional skilled industrial workers and leave their privileges intact, their leaders were pleased to tolerate the government’s apostasy. They were rather taken aback to discover that no such deals could be cut with Mrs. Thatcher.