I have long been fascinated by the passing of ways of life. In 1975, shortly after I qualified as a doctor, I went for a few months to work in Rhodesia, as it was then still called. I wanted to witness the last gasp of the colonial world before it passed into an oblivion from which it would be rescued only by vilification.
Scarcely fourteen years later, at the beginning of 1989, another way of life, which had then seemed entrenched and solid enough to endure a millennium, was under threat: communism. Its failure in the land which had first adopted it was evident for all to see, and denied by practically no one. There was ferment in communism’s empire: the spectre of liberty was haunting Eastern Europe. I knew I had to hurry if ever I were to experience the full flavour of communist autocracy.
Fortunately for me, though not for the millions of people who had to live in them, there remained on the periphery of the communist world a handful of states whose leaders refused to read the writing on the wall, and who were dedicated to the petrification of their own absolute power. It was to those countries, starting with Albania in April 1989, and ending with Cuba in January 1990, that I bent my steps. My visits were short and hence my experience of each country, however intense, was necessarily limited; but because the countries were of such diverse cultures, the common effects wrought by communism stood out all the more clearly, and gave to my journeys a comparative perspective that a more prolonged sojourn in any one of them could not have given. Individually unimportant as the countries might be in world history, collectively they tell us much about one of the central political currents of the twentieth century.
I do not claim I approached my travels with my mind a tabula rasa as far as communism was concerned. Only an anchorite who had spent the last half-century in a cave or a fool could have done that. In 1988, I had visited the Baltic Republics, which were just emerging from five decades of coma punctuated by nightmare. Everyone I met there had terrible stories to tell. A professor of chemistry recalled his schooldays under Stalin when he would emerge from school to find trucks parked outside with parents crowded inside. If yours were among them you climbed aboard and were deported to Siberia, never to be heard of again. A woman of my own age remembered, as a child, sitting up till three o’clock in the morning for several months in all the clothes she possessed, because the secret police might call at any hour up till then to deport the entire family, giving it no time to prepare. Such experiences were not those of isolated, disaffected individuals, but of entire nations: not of a few score, but of scores of millions of people.
Nor were these atrocities unconnected with the doctrine in whose name they were committed. In my youth, as a student, I read a fair bit of Marx and Lenin, and shared a house with an unreconstructed Marxist-Leninist who believed that the organisation of which he was the General Secretary – which had one other member – was the only genuinely Marxist-Leninist organisation in the world. He read the speeches of Enver Hoxha and Leonid Brezhnev as others read murder mysteries; he preferred nylon shirts to all others not because they were comfortable or aesthetically pleasing, but because they represented a Triumph of Man over Nature, No beautiful landscape was complete for him without a factory with smoking chimneys, because there was no smoke without proletarians, and no proletarians without Revolution. It didn’t take me long to conclude that communism was dismal, and that the words of Marx and Lenin betrayed an infinite contempt for men as they were, for their aspirations, their joys and sorrows, their inconsistencies, their innermost feelings, their achievements and failings. Below the surface of their compassion for the poor seethed the molten lava of their hatred, which they had not enough self-knowledge to recognise.
I make no claim, therefore, to have travelled in a neutral frame of mind. But neutrality is not a precondition of truth, which itself is not necessarily the mean between two extremes. One does not expect neutrality of someone investigating Nazism, and would be appalled if he affected it; why, then, expect it of someone investigating a different, but longer-lasting, evil?