Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  Tyrannies in Latin America or Asia may be terrible, Jeane Kirkpatrick said. But they can be overthrown. Communist tyrannies, on the other hand, seem to be permanent. They are a bourne from which no traveller returns, a fish-trap with an entrance but no exit. They are like that American device for killing cockroaches: ‘The Roach Motel – They Check In, But They Don’t Check Out!’

  The Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote: ‘In a Fascist dictatorial State, everyone knows that it will end one day. Everyone looks to the end of the tunnel. In the empire to the East, the tunnel is without end, at least from the point of view of a human life.’

  This is the argument that counts. It is passionately embraced by opposition groups and dissidents throughout Eastern Europe. It is the root for their disconcerting affection for the New Right in the West. ‘Don’t talk to us about the poor Chileans,’ they say, ‘and don’t tell us how wicked Reagan is over Nicaragua. Pinochet can be removed. But Sandinista Marxism will be for ever. Sure, right-wing dictators kill far more people. But even that is better than sealing a whole nation in the tomb, however peaceful that tomb may be.’

  I often hear this. I have heard it from a man translating Irving Kristol for samizdat, from a woman crouched over a spluttering radio to listen to Roger Scruton – no other – explaining why universal free education is an evil. I still think it’s a feeble explanation of the world.

  It is true that Communism is more efficient at suppressing internal challenge than Fascism – always prone to praetorian struggles – and much more efficient than the murderous oligarchies of Latin America. But the frozen, unalterable face of Communist regimes owes most to the Cold War in general and Soviet policy in particular. Without Soviet tanks, used to preserve a Soviet version of Marxist orthodoxy, Eastern Europe would have changed out of recognition. Without the danger that sudden change would lead to a world crisis, Vietnam and Cuba would find it harder to be so rigid.

  And beyond this war of distinctions between Pinochet and Jaruzelski – this grisly attempt to work out how many murdered Honduran peasants and starving babies in KwaZulu weigh as much in the moral scales as one hopeless and wasted life in Prague – there is a huge collapse of human nerve. For the argument about ‘totalitarian’ and ‘authoritarian’ regimes reveals that we in the West have not merely lost faith in the idea of the State. We have forgotten why anyone ever wished to erect one.

  The wretched millions who live beyond the political margins, kept out by poverty and frequently by government terror, dream of a mighty State of all the people which will arise to enforce equality and justice. In the West, however, we have come to think of State power in terms of Auschwitz or the Gulag, as the totalitarian monster into which the State can (but need not) develop.

  The poet Czesław Miłosz, a dignified pessimist, believes this development can’t be avoided. ‘The egalitarian tendency … favours the installation of the totalitarian State, as does the riddance of hunger and misery for those who have nothing to lose except their chains.’

  And here, finally, the whole flesh-creeping argument vanishes up its own backside. To fight for freedom and equality is to ensure that you will lose them for ever. We have arrived at the central nonsense of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine. It is ‘authoritarian’ indeed, for it accepts and sanctions that ‘need to ensure stability against the advance of sceptical reflections.’

  It’s good that President Reagan has dropped it. It would be better if one did not suspect that he still subscribes to it in his heart.

  [1986

  Suffering Writing

  In Budapest, the Europeans have been talking about European culture. And for one unforgettable week they talked in counterpoint: officially in one place, unofficially in another. There was a Festival, but a Fringe as well.

  In the new conference centre at the foot of the Eagle Hill, the diplomats and bureaucrats of 35 nations made their opening statements. This was the first phase of the European Cultural Forum, part of the ‘Helsinki Process’ of the conferences on European security and cooperation which have been plodding on for over 10 years now. And sitting packed like sardines on the floor of a loft-flat on the Gellert Hill, writers from Europe and America discussed freely for two days the problems of censorship, of exile, of how to define a ‘European spirit’ in the literature of a divided continent.

  In the first of these columns, I proposed that it was no longer useful to talk about ‘European civilisation,’ that Europe is a vigorous, dangerous, barbarous place. So I found it tedious at the Cultural Forum to listen to one highly-educated bureaucrat after another fluting on (the Western ones especially) about the nobility of the European heritage, about cathedrals and the international baroque, about the values of individual creative liberty that we are supposed to have treasured so tenderly, about the legacy of Christendom from the Atlantic to the Urals.

  How pretty, if European history had really been like that! How simple to talk as if an immemorial European unity had been suddenly partitioned by the wicked Communists and their barbed wire! Europe was never united, and those who came nearest to uniting it were Napoleon and Hitler. But the Communist speeches were no better, mostly recitations of publishing statistics and totals of students in higher education, coupled with pious outcries about the vileness of Western pornography.

  But it is unfair to judge the Forum by its vapid start. Something can be achieved here. The West has managed to secure an agenda which includes ‘creation, dissemination and cooperation.’ The Soviet Union wanted only to discuss the safe topic of ‘cultural cooperation,’ but – as an unspoken condition for getting some progress in the Stockholm talks on military ‘confidence building measures,’ which the Russians care about -must now put up with five weeks of detailed accusations about censorship, the denial of visas to artists, the ‘blacking’ of artists and the jamming of radio programmes.

  With luck, there will be agreement about the exchange of cultural centres, about more travelling theatres and exhibitions, even about translations from smaller languages. The Russian classics are almost as familiar to us in the West as our own. But most Hungarian writing, and the tremendous literature of nineteenth-century Poland, remain unknown to us. If the Forum gave us Słowacki, Mickiewicz, Norwid, Petöfi, Ady and Attila Jozsef, our children would understand their world in a way that we cannot.

  So the dead would cross frontiers and cast new spells. The living, however, have no such hope. The Forum cannot play Leonora in ‘Fidelio’ and lead into free daylight the prisoners of cultural dictatorship in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland. Czechoslovakia, for example, will continue to censor and blacklist thousands of its best writers, scholars, artists and actors.

  This was what the writers gathered in the flat on the Gellert Hill were talking about. But they did not moan about their condition. They did not lavish praise on the West; indeed, one Hungarian spoke of the West as a ‘masturbating culture’ which had lost the energy to plan the future or take initiatives. Instead, they talked self-critically about the illusions of writers, about the occupational diseases of literature under dictatorship.

  Danilo Kis, a Yugoslav of Hungarian nationality, described self-censorship, the lonely struggle which ‘compromises the most moral individuals whom external censorship has failed to break.’ Even those who won the struggle found their writing marked by it, in the form of a ‘dominance of metaphors.’ For a very few, there would ultimately be a ‘violent collapse of years of prudence: metaphors collapse and there remains only the raw language of action.’

  The Czech novelist Jiři Gruša, who now lives in exile, mocked the whole ‘prophetic’ tradition of literature in Central Europe. Writers could hardly complain that the state took such a suffocating interest in them, when – in the struggles for national independence – they had ‘glorified the modern state, first as godhead, then as universal provider.’ Now the ex-prophets were sorry for themselves. But ‘if we want to talk about our “right to history,” we should remember that our patriotic odes a
re found in all the schoolbooks of Europe and contributed substantially to the disaster of this continent.’

  In the air hung an unspoken apology, the guilt of Western writers about their own freedom. This guilt produces some silliness. There is a tendency to exaggerate the difficulty of achieving literature in the lands east of the dividing line. And there is an opposite tendency to suppose that the struggle against censor and policeman can actually generate writing of a splendour which the West cannot attain.

  This second line has been taken by the critic George Steiner. But he was attacked by Philip Roth, in a recent interview, who went to the other extreme and argued that the repression of writers in Czechoslovakia was so severe that it had practically destroyed literature. ‘That system doesn’t make masterpieces, it makes coronaries, ulcers and asthma, it makes alcoholics, it makes depressives…. Nine-tenths of the best (writers) will never do their best work, just because of the system.’

  Milan Kundera, the great Czech novelist who lives in Paris, also fears that Czech culture itself may be dying: ‘Finis Bohemiae.’ But those who have stayed in Bohemia don’t share that pessimism. In a book called ‘A Besieged Culture: Czechoslovakia Ten Years After Helsinki,’ published in Sweden to coincide with the Forum, the writer Ivan Klimá counter-attacks from Prague.

  He retorts, in effect, that good writing can and does go on. Oppression doesn’t debase it, even though it often cannot be published. ‘Good literature and good art do get created in places where, according to a simplified outlook, you would expect to find nothing but “ulcers, asthma, depression and insanity”.’ Klimá argues that ‘to say that no genuinely great work of art (but for one or two exceptions) can come out of this entire huge part of the world seems to me no more justified than to say that it cannot be created in conditions of freedom because writers who are free lack suffering.. Λ

  And all these passionate disputes among writers have – it seems to me – a message for the delegates at the Budapest Cultural Forum. Not a long one, either. It could be put into a telegram. It would read something like this:

  ‘You do not own us. You did not create us. Actually, we created you – a mistake we are working on. You cannot make us write well, and you cannot stop us writing either. Kindly clear up the mess you have made in Europe, as it is difficult to devise characters when history is petrified. Meanwhile, please supply the following: paper, typewriters, passports, the foreign books we need for our work, and publishers in our own countries. Yours, without much affection, the writers of Europe.’

  [1985

  The Unsung Heroes of Chernobyl

  ‘The Soviet news coverage of Chernobyl was late, meagre but not untrue. The Western coverage was fast, massive and misleading.’

  The speaker was Dr Hans Blix, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The audience was the International Press Institute, a body composed mostly of editors from the non-Communist world, and Dr Blix – just back from Moscow, Kiev and Chernobyl itself – was addressing the IPI assembly in Vienna last week.

  I thought there would be an insurrection in the hall. Not a bit of it. The assembled editors and managers were for the most part meek, almost penitent. This may have had something to do with the fact that about half the enormous American contingent had been too frightened of terrorism to turn up. Be that as it may, Chernobyl thrust its way into almost every session of the meeting, and there was an unmistakable feeling that the Western media had wildly overdone their reporting.

  Dr Blix, a peremptory, even authoritarian figure, has his own corner to defend. He is the world’s senior spokesman for the nuclear industry, in its peaceful aspect. He is concerned to keep the Soviet Union cooperating with the IAEA, rather than to pillory Soviet failings over Chernobyl, and has secured a Soviet commitment to come to Vienna in about a month’s time and lay a full, detailed analysis of the disaster and its causes before the Agency.

  Understanding all that, I still felt Dr Blix was far too kind to the Soviet media. Nobody would excuse a fire brigade that was ‘late and meagre,’ but which poured a trickle of genuine water rather than petrol on the embers when it finally turned up. For a population showered with deadly radiation, instant information is a matter of life or death. No ‘right to know’ can be more desperate, or more immune to the argument of ‘let’s wait till we have the full picture.’ It is also undeniable that some of the first Tass information, in good faith or bad, was indeed untrue.

  The crass, defensive silence in Moscow, however, allowed full resonance to the terrific scream of jubilation that burst from the Western media – the Anglo-Saxon, above all. The Murdoch Press, for example, gave inimitable tongue, from the New York Post’s reports of over 20,000 dead through the Sun’s ‘Red Nuke Disaster’ – ‘2,000 Dead Riddle’ down to the merely absurd Sunday Times picture of a ‘radiation cloud’ over Kiev.

  Television in Britain, on one memorable night, was able to assure the nation that a full-scale core melt-down was actually taking place at that moment, with 180 tons of molten uranium descending through the Chernobyl foundations to reach the water table. It was the same night that ‘experts’ debated the economic prospects of the Soviet Union, robbed of the entire grain province of the Ukraine.

  Sucked along in the updraught of all this hot air, whole governments began to leave the ground. In Washington, officials blithely speculated about a Ukrainian apocalypse until their own agonised nuclear industry pointed out the damage they were doing at home. The European Community imposed a quite unnecessary total ban on East European produce. Utter confusion reigned in West Germany, where the State Government of Hesse – with a Green Minister – declared a radioactivity threshold for milk eight times lower than that of the Federal Government. Austria told parents not to let children sit on the grass. Sainsbury’s in Muswell Hill, London, ran out of bottled water and Long Life milk. Never in history have so many people said so much about something they understood so little.

  None of this tale of exaggeration, however, is meant to underestimate what happened. As the invisible plume waved slowly across Europe, something said by a few people for a long time became – I think permanently – recognised as wisdom. The release of radioactive material into the environment is a crime against humanity. Those responsible for the release – negligent planners, corrupt contractors, bungling engineers, servile managers – are criminals against humanity. Some would say that those who accept any use of nuclear energy are criminals too. I don’t agree. But this disaster is universal, and to say: ‘Red nukes are bad; ours are good’ is more dangerous than any melt-down.

  So Chernobyl has been not just a catastrophe but a missed chance – missed so far, at least. Its effect has not been to make manifest a common interest in the survival of life. Instead, it has sharply intensified the mutually hostile images of East and West: what Germans called the Feindbild.

  It did not have to be like that. Arrant nationalism dances on the frontiers of technology, and yet there is still a feeling among ordinary people that physical discovery, with all its risks and its unknowns, should unite rather than divide. When Challenger exploded and its seven men and women perished, there was -so friends in Moscow tell me – a spontaneous wave of horror and sympathy in the Soviet public.

  Why has there been almost nothing like that in the West over Chernobyl? In part, it’s a matter of presentation. The fearsome film of Challenger’s disintegration was given to all the world to see, more powerful than hours of ideological footnote. The long, long silence of the Soviet Government over Chernobyl changed fear abroad into wrath and came to seem like a hostile act – which in effect it was, as Mr Gorbachov now seems tardily to grasp. The propagandists of the West were presented with the issue of the decade, and they used it.

  We know now that, in the horror of Chernobyl, scientists at the other reactors on the site stayed at their posts. It also came out that technicians from all over the Soviet Union have been entering the intense radiation of the stricken Chernobyl IV to fight the fire and secu
re the controls. They go for brief spells, in relays. A casual answer to a journalist’s question revealed that they are volunteers.

  A few Western newspapers and broadcasts speculated on the awful courage of these men (and possibly women), and on what could be happening to their bodies. But for the most part, a combination of official Soviet dislike of ‘personalisation’ and Western indifference have kept them on the margin of the picture. It was not until last Wednesday that Mr Gorbachov called them ‘heroic’ – still without details.

  But they were, and are, heroes. And I don’t think that I am misreading the mood in this country, at least, to say that many people would have been glad to have honoured them, to have read or heard far more about them, and to have had confirmed their feeling that beyond the curtain of political hostility there still live individuals as brave, generous and reckless as Russians always have been.

  Blame Soviet paranoia and secrecy, blame Cold War opportunism in the West: for both reasons, the chance that their acts might make Chernobyl something to unite rather than divide was lost. All the same, the invisible thing they fight, as it comes out of the reactor, is the mortal enemy of us all, not just of the Soviet Union. So was that other enemy, in 1941. And – then as now – if they lose, we lose.

  [1986

  Russian Mist

  A few days ago, they unveiled a statue of Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest. Wallenberg, it will be remembered, was the Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews from death in Nazi-occupied Hungary, and vanished in 1945. The World Jewish Congress, meeting in Budapest last week, also paid reverence to his memory.