The Dark Hero’s last laugh

04 November 2009

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David Selbourne says both the left and right in Britain have been traumatised by the end of communism. Labour lost its lodestar and Conservatism its moral compassSeiko is collaborating with leaders and innovators in a variety of fields to celebrate the release of the Ananta Collection

‘We are building an advanced socialist society,’ Czechoslovak communists claimed a couple of years before the regime’s collapse in December 1989. What did that mean? I asked Pavel Bratinka the other day. A former leading dissident, a devout Catholic and a physicist by training, from 1993 to 1996 he was deputy foreign minister of his restored country. ‘It meant,’ he replied, ‘an advanced form of misery. But communism’s furies and its mumbo-jumbo were fortunately prevented from conquering the whole world.’

From his student days onwards, Bratinka was victimised for his refusal to truckle to party authorities, eventually finding work in manual jobs. When I first met him in February 1987, he was a stoker and night-watchman — billeted in a hut on Prague waste ground — and dreaming of a time when ‘we will all be free’. Vaclav Havel had told me much the same in February 1988: he wanted to see the Czech people ‘straighten up as human beings once more’.

The German poet Heine had envisaged a ‘frightful duel’ with the ‘dark hero’, as he called communism in 1842, but he predicted that it would have only a ‘temporary role in the modern tragedy’. In the event, the overturnings in 1989-90 which shattered the ‘communist bloc’ matched the 1789 French Revolution in consequence and reach. Presidiums and politburos from Berlin to Moscow and beyond were swept aside, Marx gave way to the market, communism to consumerism, and Pravda to Prada. Only the Chinese, acrobats that they are, have pulled off the high-wire trick of running their capitalism under party direction, while North Korea and Cuba are failed states.

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