I remember the autumn day in 1990 when they came to cart away the large hammer and sickle outside my Moscow block of flats. It was about the size of a cow and made out of a gritty grey metal alloy which had, like almost everything in the USSR, never looked new or clean. Once, these objects had been all over the city. Now they were vanishing. Nobody else seemed especially interested in its departure, probably because there were — more excitingly — eggs on sale down the street. A few weeks later, I would watch the Soviet Army’s last Revolution Day parade trundle through Red Square. A few months after that I would see the litter bins of Moscow fill with burning Communist party membership cards, and the tearing down of many of the great idols of Marxism-Leninism from their plinths.
It was a time full of images, which produced many lovely symbolic photographs and films of the end of an entire historical period. But we were beguiled by these pictures into thinking something that was not true. Russian communism, as we thought we knew it, had already died long before then. The Soviet Union was, in John le Carré’s perfect metaphor in The Russia House, a knight dying inside its armour for many years before it finally toppled from its saddle. But Russian communism was not communism as a whole. That lived on, dissolving itself into a great pink political blancmange of Europhilia, political correctness, multi-culturalism and the sexual revolution.
As a 1960s Bolshevik, I am better placed than most people to know about this. I have other advantages too. After I defected, I had two very interesting first-hand experiences of communism. The first was when I was a Fleet Street industrial correspondent in the Callaghan and early Thatcher years.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in