Faber & Faber

Former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and Cabinet Minister Pavel Bratinka here pays tribute to David Selbourne's Death of the Dark Hero, his record of the extraordinary events that reshaped Europe at the end of the 1980s - an era of regime change and new liberation.

Pavel Bratinka, a Catholic intellectual and scientist,was a victim of the Czech Communist regime. For most of the 1980s - until the downfall of the Communist regime - he held only manual jobs. After the velvet revolution he became a politician, being elected to the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia. In 1993 he was appointed Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and later Cabinet Minister without portfolio responsible for intelligence and security services, research and development and national minorities. His is an important voice in the recent history of the Czech Republic.

Pavel Bratinka writes:

I have been asked many times since the realm of the Communist dinosaur folded whether I feel disappointed by the last twenty years, as if a Shangri-La could have been created in its place. Typically the question has been raised with me by people who once believed, and even preached with religious fervour, that socialist regimes were ideal arrangements whose blemishes, such as they were, would disappear in time. They apparently could not fathom that most of us who criticized those regimes were not inverted copies of themselves; that we did not possess their absolutist mindsets, and therefore did not believe that a perfect society could be attained through ‘capitalism’ and the ‘free market’, or anything else. Moreover, as a Catholic, I dogmatically reject the possibility of there being a perfect society in this world.

But disappointed I am for different reasons, and in the following ways.

First, Communist ideology consisted of a set of ideas radically severed from what until then had been considered the prerequisites of any social, political and economic order that aspired to last. The glaring absurdity of this ideology led the overwhelming majority of observers to believe that the system based upon it in the Soviet Union would soon implode.

Not only did the expected implosion not take place, but Soviet Communist power marched on for decades, conquering country after country until it towered over the world like an invincible ogre. It was only thanks to American military might that the Communist Empire did not conquer the whole world, either by direct invasion or by internal terror unleashed by local Communists.

Seas of ink and mountains of paper were expended upon analysing the Communist Empire. Specialised departments and institutions, not to speak of innumerable pundits, devoted themselves to the task of observing and analysing the system whose existence shaped the twentieth century. The research was not simply academic; all political establishments and intelligence services outside the direct reach of the Communist Empire tried to understand its power.

The effort was seemingly to no avail, since even in its twilight years almost every observer expected Communist power to mellow and decay slowly over decades. Very few people predicted its swift disappearance.

Secondly, it could have been expected that, once the Ogre lay dead, there would have been a great rush for knowledge of what had kept the Ogre going for so long, and what invisible weaknesses had made him tumble so suddenly. When millions of people who had been forced to be the flesh and bone of the Ogre were at last free to talk without fear, there was a golden opportunity to gather a critical mass of information which would demystify the mystery, reveal the secret, and decipher the enigma of Communist power.

There was no such rush. Instead, there was a seeming lack of interest. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that a large majority of academics and journalists, who derive their right to preach to the ignorant from the alleged superiority of their insights, had been proved to suffer from colossal blindness, and thus had a vested interest in burying and forgetting the whole Communist episode, the sooner the better. But political and military establishments, and security and intelligence services whose prime task is to understand power, could have been expected to dissect the Ogre’s corpse eagerly – at least in order to be better equipped for encounters with other unintelligible evils to come. Again, nothing happened.

Each year, witnesses pass away and the memories of those who remain are fading. The fact that hardly any of the perpetrators of the monstrous crimes committed during the reign of the Communist Empire were brought to trial is shameful, a shame which will haunt our century. Moreover, the fact that those who were not murdered or imprisoned had to live in self-inflicted moral numbness for years in order to remain safe from punishment has also been largely forgotten.

These cancellations and silences makes the record of Communism fatally incomplete. The ultimate crime of Communism is not that it destroyed democracy and the rule of law; and neither the killings of its opponents, nor even the frenzies of murder to instil terror in those left alive, made it uniquely evil in history. Its ultimate crime was different: that of forcing millions of people for decades to express publicly and cheerfully their consent with something they regarded as criminal, untrue or idiotic. For all but a few, the numbness was thus the only way to preserve sanity. But it was exactly this numbness which points to the secret of Communist Power - and to the secret of its sudden undoing also. Hence, the lack of research into this phenomenon not only represents a dismal moral failure to bring a source of immense suffering to light, but is an even less comprehensible failure of self-interest. The Red Ogre is dead - that is sure - but he will not be the last such ogre to threaten mankind.

If anyone doubts the nature of this evil, and that much can be learned about it by interviewing people, let him read David Selbourne´s book. It is the work of a ‘freelance’ individual, working single-handedly. And yet he has managed to record, and to convey, the realities of life in certain milieus of the communist countries which he visited, during their two closing years, in such vivid colours that the standard products of journalists and Kremlinologists compare with it as video war- games compare with a real war. When reading the passages in his book about Czechoslovakia, I found myself thrown back into an emotional time-warp, and my long-forgotten feelings about the situations he describes came alive with unexpected force.

Yes, dear reader - that is how it really was! If only there were more people like David Selbourne!

Read also: David Selbourne in the Spectator