The myth of Andropov as a liberal is one that was dug out of dusty Soviet store-rooms at the turn of the millennium, when Putin felt the need to explain to society why the secret services were beginning to play an increasingly important role in society and why KGB alumni were being installed in top positions in government and business. Retired generals and colonels, who had not played any visible part in creating business empires, had to find arguments justifying their involvement in affairs they knew nothing about.

Since they were unable to come up with any new ideas, they resorted to one that was tried and tested: presenting the Soviet secret services as a conduit of progressive economic ideas and covering up their repressive role.

Yury Andropov: potential reformer, or
hard-line communist apparatchik?

In the summer of 1999 a campaign was launched to rehabilitate Andropov, who in the 1990s had been regarded by both the government and the state media as a persecutor of dissidents and a man whose methods of dealing with the economy had been forcible but ineffective. A memorial plaque bearing Andropov's portrait reappeared on the FSB building in Lubyanka Street, from where it had been removed in August 1991 after a frenzied crowd toppled the nearby statue of Dzerzhinsky, boss of the first Bolshevik security service.

In December 1999 Prime Minister Putin attended the unveiling of the memorial plaque and the resurrection of the Andropov myth became part of the government agenda. Its aim was to demonstrate that the secret services were capable of breaking the deadlock in Russia.

In fashioning this new image of Andropov the FSB studiously omitted many facts of his life, particularly since that life did not readily lend itself to hero status. He spent the Great Patriotic War as a party worker behind the lines, while most of his fellow countrymen were risking their lives at the front. Later he spent nearly twenty years as the ruthless head of the KGB, overseeing the ever- intensifying persecution of dissidents. 

Andropov was now being presented as a leader who had found effective solutions to the country's political, social and economic problems. He suddenly turned into an economic genius of the system and a man who, following long years of stagnation under Brezhnev, had been about to launch a programme of economic reforms. It was as if he had actually initiated the perestroika subsequently proclaimed by his successor, Gorbachev.

In Andrei Konchalovsky's version Andropov would have implemented perestroika more effectively than Gorbachev, even though it is common knowledge that Gorbachev was the one who first allowed private enterprise and political parties and freed dissidents from prisons. Under Andropov the manager of a Moscow food shop who had engaged in what a liberal economic model calls entrepreneurship was executed, and the role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union remained unassailable.

In December 1999 Vladimir Putin
attended the unveiling of the memorial
plaque to Andropov at the security
services HQ in Lubyanka, Moscow

In fashioning this new image of Andropov the FSB studiously omitted many facts of his life, particularly since that life did not readily lend itself to hero status. He spent the Great Patriotic War as a party worker behind the lines, while most of his fellow countrymen were risking their lives at the front. Later he spent nearly twenty years as the ruthless head of the KGB, overseeing the ever- intensifying persecution of dissidents.

It was on his watch that the Fifth Directorate for countering dissidence was established and dissidents were routinely sent to psychiatric hospitals, from which they emerged crippled. It was rumoured that the 1956 revolution in Hungary had left an indelible mark on Andropov who was Soviet Ambassador at the time and watched from his window as officers of the Hungarian secret service were hanged from lampposts.

But of course, none of this was mentioned.  

It is indicative that Andropov's new image was created using the very same methods he himself had applied in the 1980s to resurrect the cult of Dzerzhinsky and for the same purpose: the justification of secret service interference in the economy. In Soviet propaganda the head of the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), notorious for unleashing mass terror, was presented as a modest man who slept on an iron bed and would only eat to stave off starvation, as well as the man who had rebuilt the railways and the national economy.

Any discussion of Dzerzhinsky's main activity – the persecution of class enemies – was replaced by a description of his personal traits, while only a few selected positive details of his professional life were presented to the public. The same pattern was used in the 2000s to resurrect the cult of Andropov.

Yury Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev would have found the collapse of the communist system difficult to imagine

In 2004 a three-metre-high statue to Andropov was erected in his native Stavropol Territory and the FSB Academy introduced student scholarships bearing his name. Several books glorifying Andropov were also published in the same year, including one by the historian Roy Medvedev, who in the past had exposed Stalinist repression.

The myth-makers gradually lost all sense of proportion. In 2001 Vladimir Shults, then First Deputy Director of the FSB, declared that the security service had given the country a whole pantheon of great leaders. He listed the members of this cohort: Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Yury Andropov, Sergei Stepashin (FSB Director from 1994 to 1995 and Prime Minister from 1997 to 1998), Vladimir Putin and Nikolai Patrushev (the head of the FSB at the time).

Nobody knows what effect this new mythology had on Russia's citizens in the 2000s, but 30 years ago even the Western media fell victim to Soviet propaganda and presented Andropov as a modest, ascetic and intelligent man.

The myth of Andropov as a liberal was dug out of dusty Soviet store-rooms at the turn of the millennium, when Putin felt the need to explain to society why the secret services were beginning to play an increasingly important role in society and why KGB alumni were being installed in top positions in government and business.

This is what Edward Jay Epstein had to say in 1983 in the New Republic about the image of Andropov the Soviet propaganda had created in his lifetime, which independent Western journalists swallowed hook, line and sinker:

‘Andropov's accession to power last November was accompanied by a corresponding ennoblement of his image. Suddenly he became, in The Wall Street journal, “silver-haired and dapper…” His linguistic abilities also came in for scrutiny. Harrison Salisbury wrote, “The first thing to know about Mr. Andropov is that he speaks and reads English”. Another Times story noted his “fluent English.” Newsweek reported that even though he had never met a “senior” American official, “he spoke English and relaxed with American novels”. Confirmation of his command of English appeared in Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post. The Economist credited him with “a working knowledge of German”, and U.S. News & World Report added Hungarian to the growing list. And this quadrilingual prodigy was skilled in the use of language, too. Time described him as reportedly “a witty conversationalist”, “a bibliophile”, and a “connoisseur of modern art” to boot.’

The New Republic February 7, 1983 The Andropov Hoax by Edward Jay Epstein

Irina Borogan, along with Andrei Soldatov, is co-author of The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (PublicAffairs)

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Gorbachev: the wrong man for Andropov’s reforms, by Andrei Konchalovsky, oD Russia, 30 March, 2011

------------------------ 

The Sword And The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive And The Secret History Of The KGB, by Christopher Andrew, Basic Books, First edition 1999, 736 pages

Andropov documents related to Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov, Annals of Communism, Yale University Press

Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin, Vladimir Solovyov, Elena Klepikova MacMillan Publishing Company, 1983, 302 pages

The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB, by Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, PublicAffairs, 2010, 320 pages

Agentura Web site (in English)

Sidebox: 

The idea of reform and liberalisation was entirely Andropov’s. As head of the KGB, he was better informed than anyone else about the catastrophic economic situation in the USSR. When he became head of state, he was able to start putting into effect the plan he had been hatching for a long time.  I don't think Andropov completely trusted Gorbachev. He, Andropov, belonged to the older generation and was not intending to dismantle the system; the maximum he was prepared to consider was that a new type of person should be able to rule the country.

Andrei Konchalovsky, Gorbachev: the wrong man for Gorbachev's reforms, oD Russia

Related stories: 

Gorbachev: the wrong man for Andropov’s reforms

Tatyana Zaslavskaya’s moment

Gorbachev: history will be a fairer judge

Gorbachev at eighty: evaluating his achievements

How Russia’s human rights movement began

The end of Russia?

The Embrace of Stalinism

The 2nd Hungarian Documentary and Short Film Festival in Los Angeles came to its end after ten days of continuous screenings on Sunday.

The event was organized by the Consulate General of Hungary, the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the Wende Musem of Cold War, the United Hungarian House and the South-Eastern-European Film Festival of Los Angeles.. „Civil Report - A Report by the Civil Law Committee on the Abuse of Human Rights", a film by János Gulyás won the „Ember Judit Award" out of the 31 participating films. The Consulate General of Hungary established the „Ember Judit Award" in 2010 as a tribute to the memory of the world famous Hungarian documentary film director, Judit Ember. The films participating at the festival were about the significant issues of the last decades` important historical developments,the daily life of the Hungarian minorities living in the neighbouring to Hungary countries, the Hungarian social problems and Hungarian traditions. They could present a deeper and a more personal picture on Hungary then the television and the internet. They could tell our history in an American environment. The films were selected by a Hungarian professional jury. Thanks for it to the Ministry of National Resources of Hungary, the Hungarian Documentary Film Directors` Association and the Documentary Department of the Hungarian Filmartists` Association.
Consul General Balázs Bokor underlined at the Award presenting night that the „Ember Judit Award" was given according to the votes of the audiance. All guests had the chance to cast their votes just after each screening in a written form. Apart from the award winning film the „Muzsikás Story" by Péter Pál Tóth, „Hungarian retro" by Zsigmond Gábor Papp, „Tripe and Onions" by Márton Szirmai and the „Csangos" by Ibolya Fekete were in the group of the best 5 films. According to the Consul General it is worth continuing this initiative in the future as the demonstrating of the films to an American public also contributed to increasing the Hungarian identity in the local Hungarian American community.
Daughter of Judit Ember from Texas was present at the award presentation, as she specially arrived at Los Angeles to participate at the Festival`s last night.
A separate Facebok page operated during the filmfestival where all interested people could get fresh information on the festival and about all related events, news is located here.

Civil Report - A Report by the Civil Law Committee on the Abuse of Human Rights

Director: János Gulyás, 2007
102 minutes
At a press conference held in February 2007, members of the Civil Law Committee presented cases of human rights abuse committed in Hungary in September 2006 and on the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution on 23 October. They spoke about ferenc Gyurcsány s infamous Öszöd speech, banning of public gatherings, the siege of the headquarters of the Hungarian television, police overreaction, illegal acts and serious injury caused by the use of rubber bullets. We also hear from the victims of these events whose cases are still in court with still no mention of compensation or restitution. The film includes news footage of some of the more dramatic moments of street-fighting as unarmed, peaceful demonstration struggle against an overwhelming armed response.

The title of this article may come as a great surprise to anyone who is not a student of late Soviet history.  For many of my fellow countrymen (not to mention most foreigners), the name of Yury Andropov is firmly associated with the sinister abbreviation K-G-B.  Yet what I write here is from the perspective of a witness (much of what I will say has also appeared in various source materials, particularly in Gorbachev’s own memoirs). Willing or unwilling, I observed an evolution in the Soviet political system, including in that grim and secretive organisation. And Yury Andropov, not Mikhail Gorbachev, was instrumental in bringing that evolution about.

The roots of liberal reform

Right from the death of Stalin, there were what I would call tectonic shifts in the structure of the party elite. Stalinists were desperately trying to cling on to power, and were busy  defending the criminal system, responsible as they were for the crimes of the Stalinist regime. Other, more pragmatic people — not necessarily young, for there were young defenders of Stalin too — understood that the Stalinist method of ruling the country restricted the development of society. Few of these “reformers” would have given much thought to the idea of a liberal government or to “equality of rights” – the fig-leaf slogan the Soviet authorities had always hidden behind.  For them, it was more a question of modernising society: an issue which had arisen in Stalin's time but which was not able to be properly developed until 1956, when Krushchev made his famous speech at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR (CPSU).

Some suggest Khruschev’s “secret” speech in 1956, in which
he denounced Stalin was actually a counter-attack designed to
protect himself and colleagues from prosecution.

Krushchev's move has been interpreted in various ways. People in the know at the time, however, were quite clear that his attack on Stalinism was dictated less by a desire to liberalise, more by an attempt to save part of the party elite that had realised their time was up and they would soon be called to account for their actions.  Krushchev said as much in an unpublished part of his speech: “If we don't do this, we shall be swept away and end up in the dock ourselves”, he said. He didn't even attempt to keep his intentions secret.

From that moment the battle between the Soviet “conservatives” and “liberals” became ever fiercer.  The first victim was Beria.  Rumours circulating at the time suggested that if Khrushchev hadn't had Beria shot, then Beria would have meted out the same punishment to him: Beria was supposedly planning to embark on reforms under the guise of a campaign against the cult of personality, but this time with Khrushchev's group. Other more complex versions have it that Beria planned to dismantle the whole socialist system.  Everyone knows he was a great lover of life and a sybarite, so it would have been hardly surprising if he had been tempted to become a dictator of the “Latin American” type.

Khrushchev's next victim was the group of so-called Stalinists – Molotov, Malenkov and Shipilov.  After that the battle raged unabated.  The confrontation within the party between the “liberals” and the “conservatives” was particularly intense in the fields of economics and ideology.  The Soviet system was so rigid and unbending, virtually moribund, that it became ever more difficult to develop the Military Industrial Complex, let alone the well-being of the people.

The democratic interregnum

Paradoxically, however, there was a kind of democracy flourishing in the USSR, and that was inside the narrow circle of Central Committee (CC) Politburo members.  All Politburo meetings were strictly secret, but the archives reveal that there were fairly heated discussions and confrontations between opposing points of view.  No one was subsequently held responsible, or punished: people simply said what they thought. These Politburo discussions sometimes got as far as the CC itself, if it was necessary to publicise a new tendency. 

The next period of tension between the so-called liberals and conservatives blew up at the beginning of the 1960s.  In the corridors of Dom Kino [the building at the centre of the film industry], I remember, there were intense discussions of the rumours about ideological debates going on inside the Kremlin.  The new head of the Ideology Commission, Demichev, attempted to relax control over literature and art, but this provoked a violent reaction from officials in the Soviet republics.  Everyone was discussing the news that the Georgian Ideology Secretary had leapt on to the stage and shouted “I was a Stalinist and I still am!  We will not permit the Party to be deprived of its leading ideological role!”  A direct challenge to the Politburo!  Clearly these were no longer Stalinist times, when disagreement with the proposed party course meant instant death.  But it was a sign that no reforms would get through without difficulty and that the party bosses were not afraid to protect their own interests.

Meeting Andropov’s advisors was a complete revelation, because they were young, free-thinking, educated, polyglot intellectuals.  The freedom of thought enjoyed during our discussions at the dinner table made me think that Andropov was different from those that had gone before him.

In 1957, Yuri Andropov was head of the CC Dept of Socialist Countries under Khrushchev.  He was then appointed Secretary to the Central Committee.  I remember the time very well: Andrei Tarkovsky and I were friends with some young people who were working in Andropov's foreign policy consultancy group in the CC administration.  There was Kolya Shishlin, Sasha Bovin, Zhora Shakhnazarov, Arbatov…. Andropov had invited them to join the group so as to inject some flexibility into the work of the all-powerful but cumbersome party apparatus.  For Tarkovsky and me, meeting these people was a complete revelation, because they were young, free-thinking, educated, polyglot intellectuals.  The freedom of thought that we enjoyed during our discussions at the dinner table made me think that Andropov was different from those that had gone before him.  If the likes of these people were his consultants, it indicated a wide-ranging world view, which didn't fit neatly into the dogma of the official elite. 

I should add that both Bovin and Shishlin, as well as other like-minded people in the department, were also responsible for writing the Secretary General's speeches. They told me that they always tried to see the report last, just before it was put in front of Brezhnev, and each time they checked to see that their paragraph condemning the cult of personality had not been taken out.  The Stalinists working in the editorial section never failed to remove any negative references to Stalin or to the cult of personality.  Every time, Andropov's people would promptly put the offending paragraph back into the text and “guard” it until it was time for the speech. This was a legitimate way of putting their anti-Stalinist ideas into action.

As far as I can see, Andropov symbolised a wing of the Soviet “liberals”, to a certain extent anti-Stalinists, though of course he never revealed this publicly.  He was interested in European communism, which was natural, as he had always had dealings with Western communists.  At the time, Western communism was moving actively in the direction of revising Stalinist dogma.

This long preamble is motivated by a wish to remind readers that moves toward liberalisation began not just anywhere, but from the heart of the Central Committee, and  were implemented by people I knew.

A false start

In the middle of the 1960s, and under constant pressure from the liberal wing, the party signed itself up to economic reform. Prime Minister Kosygin was charged with putting the reform into effect.  Kosygin was an economist and was quite unenthusiastic about the reforms, knowing the resistance this liberalisation would provoke among the Stalinists.  Understandably, for at that time the party had the monopoly of hearts, minds and the subsoil – in short, the riches of the whole country.  The party elite had unlimited control over everything that was produced at that time in the Soviet Union, so any liberalisation would deprive the communists of their monopolistic privileges.

I remember meeting my friend Kolya Shishlin as he was returning from talks between the leaders of the Communist Parties of Czechoslovakia and the USSR.  He came towards me with a tragic expression on his face.  “It's all over”, he said.  “We spent 10 years 'creeping up' on the enemy (Stalinist) trenches and that idiot got up and 'ran for it', giving us all away.  We’ll have to forget about reforms for another 20 years.”

The reforms and all the liberalising tendencies came to a tragic end, however, for Alexander Dubcek, Czechoslovakia's communist leader, sensed an opportunity and decided to get in first.  His Prague Spring (1968) set in motion an active programme to reform state organisations and the party.  Dubcek's project to decentralise the economy was christened “socialism with a human face”.  We watched what was happening in Prague with amazement and delight, in sharp contrast to my friends in the Central Committee, who were afraid that it could all come badly unstuck.  Which, in the end, is exactly what happened.  The Soviet Stalinists, exploiting the rapid growth of anti-Soviet attitudes in Czechoslovakia, sent in the tanks and immediately put paid to all reforms in the USSR.  The reason given was that reforms could result in a similar catastrophe: the turning of the Soviet people against the whole totalitarian system.

I remember meeting my friend Kolya Shishlin at the airport.  He was returning from talks between the leaders of the Communist Parties of Czechoslovakia and the USSR.  He came towards me with a tragic expression on his face.  “It's all over”, he said.  “We spent 10 years 'creeping up' on the enemy (Stalinist) trenches and that idiot got up and 'ran for it', giving us all away.  Our generation won’t be able to carry out reforms now: we’ll have to forget about them for another 20 years.”

He was very wise and absolutely right.  It was 20 years later, in the middle of the 1980s, that the idea of progress dawned again, when Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on the scene as a reformer. He had been transferred to Moscow at the end of the 70s under the direct protection of Andropov, who often took his holidays in the south, where he had treatment for his kidneys and where Gorbachev was First Secretary of the Stavropol Regional Committee of the CPSU.  Andropov took a shine to him and introduced him to Brezhnev, who also liked the young, educated, modern party activist.  This was how Gorbachev came to Moscow in 1978 as CC Secretary of Agriculture.

Andropov’s legacy

The idea of reform and liberalisation was entirely Andropov’s.  As head of the KGB, he was better informed than anyone else about the catastrophic economic situation in the USSR.  When he became head of state, he was able to start putting into effect the plan he had been hatching for a long time.  I don't think Andropov completely trusted Gorbachev.  He, Andropov, belonged to the older generation and was not intending to dismantle the system; the maximum he was prepared to consider was that a new type of person should be able to rule the country.

In many ways Heydar Aliyev was Andropov's more obvious successor and student. It was Aliyev that Andropov counselled to embark on reforms in his country, Azerbaijan, without worrying about the Soviet leadership.  He also recommended to Aliyev that he should study the Hungarian economy and visit Hungary more often. There, economic reforms were in full swing after the 1958 uprising and there were even private companies and banks, something quite unimaginable in the USSR.

Strongman Heydar Aliyev was arguably Andropov’s more obvious (some say preferred) successor. 

Andropov rang Aliyev and invited him to Moscow as First Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers (Sovmin), which was an economic post.  To my mind this offer of an All-Union [central] position meant significantly more than we can imagine.

Perhaps Andropov realised Gorbachev did not have the required authority to introduce reforms in the empire that was the USSR. Perhaps he understood what was needed was a politician of a different calibre.  I've heard many times from friends of Aliyev that the terminally ill Andropov was torn with uncertainty over whom he should appoint as his successor.  Many thought it might be Aliyev who would become the head of this great state.  But Aliyev himself realised the impossibility of this for a non-Russian.  After Stalin, the Russian people would not have wanted to see an Azeri from an Islamic republic as their head of state.

There were thus two fairly strong political figures in the CC Politburo when Andropov left the scene:  Heydar Aliyev, believer in a strong state and national hero of Azerbaijan; and Mikhail Gorbachev, young and raring to go out and make historic changes.  Gorbachev denies that he did everything to ensure Aliyev was not part of a possible leadership battle. At the same time, Heydar Aliyev told me himself that when he had a heart attack in 1987, Gorbachev failed to visit him in hospital, and even ignored requests to meet once he had recovered. This belied the fact that Aliyev had been one of Andropov's closest disciples and had many times spoken out in favour of Gorbachev.  The battle between these two powerful figures ended when Gorbachev achieved supreme power, while Aliyev was left under a cloud and forced to retire from the scene.

Gorbachev didn’t expect the course that events took, and for most of his time in power he was completely lost. The simple reason is that he didn't have (nor could he have had!) any real political experience which would have enabled him to perceive the results of his actions.

As a “new man”,  Gorbachev (who was born in 1931) probably thought he could free the Soviet system from all its economic and ideological encumbrances. He probably hoped that this would guarantee unprecedented economic growth and inspire the people to new heights of achievement in the field of labour and so on.  But it didn't happen.  What happened was exactly the opposite. 

The novice leader

Gorbachev certainly didn’t expect the course that events took, and for most of his time in power he was completely lost. The simple reason is that he didn't have (nor could he have done!) any real political experience which would have enabled him to perceive the results of his actions.  It's unlikely that he could have imagined dismantling the system without being buried in the resulting wreckage.  His lack of experience, education and intellectual potential meant that he had no idea of what was needed to embark on such a grandiose plan.  Of course, it's easy for us to say this now. Back then, few people had any understanding of how complicated everything was – the one passionate desire was to destroy everything “quickly and for ever”. 

Glasnost [openness] was not Gorbachev's invention: there was already a crying need for it.  Likewise, the system no longer operated by itself, so it had to be changed in some way, which is what Gorbachev called perestroika.

I myself was in America at the time and I remember listening to Gorbachev's speeches with such enthusiasm that my delight brought tears to my eyes. I started living in expectation of different times: dreaming about how Leningrad would once more become St Petersburg and the bells would once more ring in St Isaac's Cathedral, as they had before the Revolution.  I know that I had enormous hopes of Mikhail Sergeevich, and I think all my generation were the same. And a great deal of what he did for the country and for the world deserves a positive historical assessment — these was his achievements and no one else’s. At the same time he should never have forget Lenin’s sage words: that you must know where the crowd is going and be ahead of it.  In other words, you have to predict the currents of history and be in time to support them. Gorbachev failed on both counts.

By the time Gorbachev came to power, the Soviet Union's economy was in ruins and the country was on the edge of total bankruptcy.  I remember reading one of Kissinger’s articles where he argued the socialist system was destined to collapse since there was no free access to information within the Soviet Union, and development of the military-industrial complex is impossible without it. It was indeed absolutely true that there could not have been a free access to information in the Soviet Union at that time, since that would have threatened the whole system.

In other words, glasnost [openness] was not Gorbachev's invention: there was already a crying need for it.  Likewise, the system no longer operated by itself, so it had to be changed in some way, which is what Gorbachev called perestroika.  Perestroika began very promisingly, but almost immediately the cracks appeared, and these eventually brought Gorbachev to his political demise.

The Gorbachev reforms took no account of the mentality of party officials.  Most of these people were Russians: some 8-10,000 individuals who represented the nucleus of the party across the whole country.  They would certainly not have been happy about losing their economic privileges. Economic reforms without wresting control of the economy from the party were therefore simply an impossibility. Whatever reform Gorbachev undertook – the party always blocked his way forward.  His assumption that liberal reforms would bring democracy to the country were naïve and that was his fatal mistake.

The great statesman Pyotr Stolypin was sure of one 
thing: liberal reforms are only possible in Russia if you
first take control.

Gorbachev would probably not have known the wise words of the outstanding Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, but perhaps it is worth repeating them here: “in Russia liberal reforms can only be possible if the regime first clamps down, because for a Russian any relaxation in the system represents weakness”. To wrest control of the economy from the party, it was essential to strengthen the control of both the party and the state.  Gorbachev didn't do this, though I think that the wiser Aliyev would have done.  For Gorbachev, it was exactly as Stolypin: neither popular nor understood, and rejected by his own people as a “man of no guts”, “hiding behind his wife's skirts”.

In failing to to establish any control over the party, Gorbachev allowed it to splinter into factions over which he no longer had any say.  This gave rise to strong groups, and in particular to the Yeltsin bloc.

Gorbachev's greatness is not that he was a strong politician or a visionary, but that he was at the helm of government at that unique moment when internal and external forces created a gigantic tsunami wave in the Soviet Union:  first it lifted him up, then it cast him down.  He will, of course, go down in history as the opposite: a strong politician who liberated the Soviet Union from totalitarianism, and as the man who brought down the Berlin Wall (which, incidentally, he neither expected, wanted, or had any control over). 

I shall never forget Gorbachev's bewildered expression as he protested indignantly on TV: “Can you believe it?  Yeltsin came into my study with someone I can’t remember.... and they drank all my brandy!”

Or did I dream it?

Sideboxes

Related stories: 

Gorbachev at eighty: evaluating his achievements

Gorbachev: history will be a fairer judge

Tatyana Zaslavskaya’s moment

Reagan: a savvy realist

Forward, Mr President!

Motoko and I have made it to Hungary. Hungary is my father’s home country and I still have a lot of family here. I first visited when I was 5 years old and have returned many times. It really is astonishing how rapidly the country has developed in my lifetime.

Hungary in the Good Old Days

Some thirty plus years ago, Hungary was still in control of the communist U.S.S.R. This meant severe restrictions on everything we take for granted. It was impossible to travel to western countries because passports were only valid for communist block countries.

My father escaped in the 1956 revolution. Even though his escape wasn’t politically motivated, deserters were still viewed as traitors for a long time. It was 18 years before he was able to return to visit his family.

In order to buy a car, you had to pay a sizeable downpayment and apply for a number which indicated your order in the queue. The list of numbers was published in the Sunday newspaper so that everyone could track how long it would take to get a car. My uncle had to wait…

No related posts.

Hungary trooped into Wembley Stadium on Wednesday and obligingly lost 2-1 to an Engand team desperate to regain some credibility with their fans after the debacle of the World Cup.

It was a different story in 1953 when England, who had never been beaten at home by a team outside the British Isles, were hammered 6-3 by the "magical Magyars" with  players like Puskas and Hideguti who were unknown before the game, but household names afterwards.

It took the 1956 revolution to really break up that great, tactically groundbreaking Hungarian team.

But, as in 1953, the winds of change are blowing frostily over English soccer.

Most of the top teams are foreign owned, most of the players are not English and I'm not sure that English fans realise just how much of a dent the English game took from the World Cup.

The Premier Division, which outpaces every other league in the world in terms of fan interest and revenue, may be at its zenith. But the credit crisis is going to take its toll of the top teams, and all must be looking in horror at the carnage of Portsmouth, two years ago a credible Premier League side and now heading  dizzily towards League One. If they last that long.

The new squad limit of 25, and new limits on foreign players, mean that clubs may not be able to buy success as easily as in the past.

And, just as the German economy is bucking worldwide trends with growth, their soccer is on the ascendant. The Bundesliga draws more fans per game than Premier League games do, and the league is actually more profitable than the EPL. That means they are more stable. And stable the English league most certainly is not.

England manager Fabio Capello is part of the changes, although which way the wind is blowing him is a mystery to us all.

The way he ended David Beckham's England career this week was quite disgraceful. It's not enough to blame his shaky English for telling a TV show that Beckham was too old to play competitive games. You just don't pick your team on TV. Beckham deserved a lot better than that,

Beckham, ever the England loyalist, reportedly has turned down Capello's offer to give him a last run out in a friendly against France.

You can't blame him. At least he can shelter from that cold wind.

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent  

 

Documentary films are supposed to wake us up -- usually to some strange sub-culture (read: the world of Baby Beauty Pageants or Professional Eating Contests) -- to give a glimpse at how remarkably bizarre human beings can be. Typically with films, we're allowed to become voyeurs, stare agape at the amusing spectacle of mankind. Not so with TORN FROM THE FLAG, filmmaker Klaudia Kovacs' chronicle of the 1956 October Revolution in Hungary that was a high-water mark of the Cold War. 

 

In TORN, we are compelled to find our own sense of personal political responsibility, even genealogical threads, woven into this documentary. But there is also an extremely powerful allegory embodied in the developments that occurred during this tumultuous period in the world.

 

Remarkably, the film begins with a cogent opening statement about the Cold War's origins in Budapest from Otto von Hapsburg, son of Emporer Charles II. He is a delicate, bespectacled elderly man who would be heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire had he not abdicated in 1961. 

 

Von Hapsburg's opening salvo plays over a montage of Stalinist marches, speeches from Khrushchev, Kennedy, and a mushroom cloud. 

 

"We, today, do not realize there was a third World War, and that is what we call 'The Cold War.' And the decisive battle of the Cold War took place here in Hungary." 

 

Newsreel narration finishes the thought: "At Yalta, in the Soviet Crimea, world leaders from three great states meet to write the epitaph of Fascist aggression. Britain, the USSR, and the United States plan to consolidate the gains of this war. Out of victory the larger responsibility of peace appears." 

 

Historic frames of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in conference imply goodwill. "We were sold down the river in Yalta," von Hapsburg retorts. "The Russians received Hungary," and other surrounding sovereign nations that would soon become Communist Block countries. 

 

So begins the Cold War and TORN. 

 

Noteworthy cameos (i.e.; newsman Edward R. Murrow, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hungarian Dictator Rakosi) are featured, as well as soul-wrenching recaps from ordinary people who succeeded in fighting off the yoke of Soviet domination after the Russian territory grab at Yalta. 

 

Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State (1973 - 1977) and Foreign Policy Advisor, makes quite an impressive talking head. 

 

"We lived with the consequence that decisions we made could cause 100's of millions of casualties." 

 

He is, in a word, magnificent -- harking back to a time when politics around the world, and in the US, was not just a beauty contest (consider Sarkozy-Bruni or the Obama phenom). 

 

Still razor sharp, Kissinger intones admonitions about the lasting effects of ill-conceived global political agendas, world leaders' inherent shortsightedness, and the dangers of enlisting oppression as an effective public policy initiative -- all with his usual brio. 

 

Other substantive geo-political thinkers include Csaba Bekes, Founding Director of the Cold War History Research Center in Budapest; William Taubman, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner for Khrushchev's biography; and historian Dr. Mark Kramer, who is also Harvard University's Director of the Cold War Studies Project. These guys know their "stuff," to put it in layman's terms.

 

But perhaps the most jaw-dropping part of Kovacs' October '56 exploration is the tales of peasants, politicos, poets, and soldiers who created the momentum to throw off Stalinist ideology. 

 

Factory Worker Istvan Porubsky was scared "spitless," but devised an ingenious way to deflect Russians tanks. "We turned over soup plates," lined them up on the roads. The Russians "thought they were land mines!"

 

Poet Inez Kemenes recounts her spiritual and intellectual arc from gung-ho Stalinist youth to full-blown Hungarian political insurgent. "I wanted to work. So they had me sit on a board and pull out nails. We believed we were building a Socialist dream. Everybody would be happy."

 

"At 15 if anybody told me to go and be a suicide bomber for freedom of the world, I would not have hesitated for a second." Yet, with the revelations about Stalin's regime, "we felt raped." Kemenes adds "our soul was raped... one by one, things turned out to be not as we had believed." 

 

George Vassiliou, who later became President of Cyprus from 1988 to 1993, talks of his days as a Communist Activist turned political refugee in Hungary. 

 

Arpad Nagy recalls his incredible psychological journey from AVO (Hungarian Secret Service) agent to anti-AVO activist. "There was blood everywhere... I said 'God, where am I?'"

 

Businessman George Mismas, who escaped to the West, painstakingly remembers his time as a boy in the Gulag, and how the "testical torture" finally broke his father's spirit. "He was never the same after that... but (Imre) Nagy came in and finally closed the camps."

 

Laszlo Dozsa, a schoolboy turned street fighter who had essentially been a child soldier during the conflict, said he was left for dead in a mass grave. "There were 30 or 40 of us." Gravediggers "threw lime dust on us, and my muscles twitched."

 

"One of the gravediggers said 'Look! The kid's alive!"

 

Ferenc Varnai, a former Communist Official, recalls being present at the 20th Party Congress when Khrushchev made the "secret speech" that shocked the world, denouncing Stalin as a war criminal.

 

Stalin's stunning crimes against humanity were revealed: Mass Executions, Systematic Torture, Mass Deportations, Mass Starvation, and Genocide.

 

Hungarian Army Officer Robert Szalay details the exhilaration of tearing down Josef Stalin's huge statuary. When the outsized leader wouldn't budge, the crowd used "a big beast of a truck," hacksaws, hammers, anything and everything, to beat down the bronze likeness. 

 

Then, with wire cables snapping all around as the bulk of the Soviet figurehead fell, only "his boots" were left standing, Szalay exalts.

 

Arguably one of the most gripping personal stories comes from Arpad Szlama. 

 

Szlama was a Hungarian Army officer turned insurgent before he was locked away for 15 years. He remembers being set free and, with the mindset of a 26-year-old, having to greet the reflection of a 41-year-old man for the first time. "It broke me." 

 

As a political prisoner freed after Stalin's death, Szlama "only wanted revenge" on society. But, "I heard a little girl in the next room ask 'Is he going to become my Daddy?' And all the fight went out of me. I knew I had to rebuild, to live again." 

 

Unfortunately, Arpad Szlama died in 2007, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a more emotionally resilient human being anywhere in the world.

 

That said, what Klaudia Kovacs does in this documentary is to provide a nuts-and-bold assessment of the rise of state-sponsored oppression and its consequent toll on the citizenry. 

 

While "collectives" usurp private property and obliterate personal gain, the cultural environment creates a stranglehold on intellectuals who are dubbed "the ruling class." 

 

The proletariat, workers of the field, are ostensibly lauded until the mask is ripped off the ideology; farmers are "sent to jail for slaughtering two pigs instead of one."

 

As mentioned, sewn into the narrative threads of TORN, you begin to note parallels to now.

 

Collectives take over the "mom and pop shops" in Hungary (insert: corporate entities like Starbucks and Borders taking over independent bookstores and family-owned coffee houses).

 

Before the '56 October Revolution there is a climate of suspicion in the country (insert: Homeland Security); mass immigrant deportations and arrests-without-cause are rampant (insert: Draconian immigration laws floated in Arizona). 

 

The catch-phrase became, according to Tool and Die Maker Gyorgy Lassan, "there are only three kinds of Hungarians -- those who are in jail, those who have been in jail, and those who will be sent to jail" (insert: privatization of the prison system in California).

 

Slowly, as a direct result of the peasant and student uprisings in Budapest, countered by the brutal military response from Soviet tanks seen by the civilized world, the geographic dominoes of Soviet domination clatter as they fall in a crescendo with US and Russian cooperation by 1989. 

 

The topper is the line that made former US President Ronald Reagan famous: "Mr. Gorbachev, will you tear down that Wall?" 

 

In the credits, Kovacs' thanks a laundry list of donors, investors, Hungarians and emigres, historians, and below-the-line folks, including the legendary Director of Photography Vilmos Sigsmond, ASC, and TORN DP Laslo Kovacs, ASC, (presumably a relative). Sigsmond and Laslo Kovacs are Executive Producers on the project. 

 

Sigsmond, Kovacs and cinematographer Jozsef Miko, are significant because these three actually shot some of the real-time footage during the period. The title, TORN FROM THE FLAG, triumphantly reveals its meaning in the archival footage. 

 

In sum, TORN with subtitles and in English, is not to be missed; it has the kind of gravitas that reminds us why movies are important, why we gather in public spaces known as theatres, and how the rights, freedoms and dignity of the individual did not show up overnight, but took years of bloody resistance to brutal abuses of authority to achieve.

 

Visit the website www.tornfromtheflag.com to find out more. 

 

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The Honourable Jim Prentice, Minister of the Environment and Minister responsible for Parks Canada, today announced the designation of the Refugees of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution as a national historic event. This designation reflects the importance of this event for our national history and for the way in which it helped to change Canadian immigration policies.

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Another small and unpretentious film festival, Palić  International Film Festival founded in 1992 in Subotica, Serbia ended last night. 17th Issue of the festival  this year substrated all values of European film. And to make things clear, Palić Film Festival has an international character and this year presented New Belgian Film and Hungarian Cinematography in the section of a New Hungarian Film, beside the usual competitive program at Official Selection and Parallels and Encounters. But first things first, Palić  International Film Festival 2010, before the beginning, awarded with laureate Želimir Žilnik, ex Jugoslavian black wave filmmaker with prestigeous Erste Underground Spirit Award. "The work of Želimir Žilnik is deeply etched in the history of world cinema as the voice of the oppressed and humiliated, the voice of individuals and marginal groups, as a rebellion against any repressive social system. The consistency of his struggle is proved by the fact that there is hardly any European post-war ideology which he has not disputed, leaving behind a document that lasts and remains as the evidence of the time he worked in. As a driving force of the Yugoslav 'black wave', he introduced this movement to the world cinema with his Early Works (1969), which was awarded the Golden Bear in Berlin. In addition to filmmaking, Želimir Žilnik has made a huge contribution to the independent film scene through education of young film enthusiasts, numerous workshops and lectures held in our region and across Europe", it is said in the explanation of the Festival.

 

 

l.    An International Jury at the 17th European Film Festival Palić held at Palić Lake in Serbia (with juriest Hans Christian Leitich, Jaana Puskala, Iva Krajnc, Vladimir Paskaljević and Eran Kolirin) decided to award Golden Tower For The Best Film How I Ended The End Of The Summer directed by  Aleksei Popogrebsky. The Jury explained the decision: "Expanding the concept of a psycho thriller, a maximum of effects with a minimum of means is achieved by superb use of sound design, naturalistic as well as symbolic images and directing the actors. This is used for a message, which underlines the necessity to communicate in an alienated world, between people, between generations, between old and new schools of thinking."     While Palić Tower For The Best Director went to a film The Robber directed by Benjamin Heisenberg, for „ extracting a beautiful thesis about compulsiveness as a mean for salvation and the everlasting struggle for freedom - in the disguise of a genre film. By displaying a variety of narrative rhythms, the film manages to move between naturalism in daily routines and the pace of the protagonist's soul „

Special Mention Award  went to a film Gordos by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo„for celebrating the lust for life and making us hungry and horny in times of crisis. Funny films are important, and they are easily overlooked - so we were pleased to give a special mention to a colorful play on the tragicomic subject of body weight„  
Tolerance Award went to Street Days  directed by Levan Koguashvili „for its way of building moral suspense in a slice of life narrative, for its outstanding, mostly non-professional actors performance and for its promotion of values without judging or moralizing, in a superior and refined way.“   And Special Mention to The Temptation Of St. Tony by Veiko Õunpuu, „for its deconstruction of narrative in a spectacular cinematic way, for its contagious sense of absurdistic humor, for its irresistible images.“ 

 Hungarian Cinematography Right now I would like to focus on the New Hungarian film,  shown on Palić Film Festival in Serbia. The film is about political changes in Hungary to deal with political enemies of a post II World War and communist informers: film that clearly describes the actual atmosphere of Hungarian society in 70s. Peter is a critic that has been sent to Brussels, by Hungarian secret police, to put up Anna Kéthly, a social democratic politician, to come back from exile to Hungary. Anna Kéthly is Hungary's most influential émigré politician Anna Kéthly. And Kéthly is a woman who has tried to uncover real Kadar goverment (and post II World War Hungarian society) and revolution in 1956, but has been forced to leave Hungary and exile to Brussels. The meetings in Brussel, between Peter and Anne, are clever, romantic (inspite of a great age difference), also filled with warm old memories and burried emotions, to a very surface.   The story is directed by female director of ex Soviet era in Eastern Europe, Marta Meszaros, by screenplay adapted from Anne’s  semi-autobiographical diary. The film is truly powerful insight of a hard communist political impact on personal lives. The Last Report on Anna really does describe life of a social democrat politician Anna Kéthly, appointing greatly at nostalgia and a great emotional loss of Anna, shown through Anna’s personal memories, ever so intelligently put. It is  a utterly compelling story about an exceptional fidelity and passion. 

            

 

Politician, activist and writer of the left

Ken Coates, who has died after a suspected heart attack, aged 79, was one of the most perceptive minds and eloquent voices of the radical left. From the mid-1960s, for four decades he was a major influence in seeking to renew and give greater coherence to militant left politics. He was the leader of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation during the anti-Vietnam war campaigns and was the key animator of the Institute for Workers' Control, founded in 1968, during a period of major confrontations between the trade unions and the Labour government of Harold Wilson.

Ken was born in Leek, Staffordshire, to Eric and Mary Coates, and was brought up in Worthing, in West Sussex. When called up for national service in 1948, he refused to be drafted into the army, then fighting communist and nationalist guerrillas in Malaya. He opted instead to work for eight years as a miner in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfield, during which time, inspired by the trade unionists he worked with, he developed a lifelong commitment to the cause of organised labour.

Coates's political career was punctuated by clashes with authority. As a teenager in the 40s, he joined the Communist party, but fell foul of the party leadership as a result of his opposition to Stalin's 1948 denunciation of Tito. He was subsequently a strong supporter of the 1956 Hungarian revolution against Moscow rule, which in some ways prefigured his work in the 80s as a founder of European Nuclear Disarmament, with peace movement activists in both western and eastern Europe.

In the aftermath of 1956, Coates, with a handful of comrades, was an active supporter of the Trotskyist Fourth International organisation. Influenced by the Belgian economist Ernest Mandel, one of the leaders of the Fourth International, Coates helped relaunch an organisation of British supporters that later evolved into the International Marxist Group.

Coates did not respond well to the strictures of orthodoxy and preferred to work in broader leftwing initiatives. He was active in the New Left movement in the late 50s, with EP Thompson, Ralph Miliband and Michael Barratt Brown. He served for a period on the editorial board of International Socialism magazine in the early 60s. By this time, he had a scholarship as a mature student at Nottingham University, gaining a first class honours degree in sociology. He went on to tutor in adult education at Nottingham (and was made special professor in continuing education, 1990-2004).

Coates first emerged as a significant political figure on the left after the launch of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1966. His work with Russell had begun in earlier campaigns against nuclear weapons. The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign organised some of the largest political demonstrations seen in Britain, at the height of the US war.

Two years later, the launch of the Institute for Workers' Control coincided with an upsurge in rank-and-file trade union militancy and attracted the support of large numbers of shop stewards, as well as influential trade union leaders such as Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers' Union and Hugh Scanlon of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Coates's focus on achieving reforms designed to increase the role of workers in running their enterprises – including the Bullock Report on industrial democracy of 1977 – attracted criticism from more orthodox Marxists. But those years saw a remarkable flowering of "workers' plans" for alternative production to meet social needs. The best known of these was the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards' proposal in the face of plant closures; they prepared detailed plans for converting from arms production to a range of "socially useful products", which included portable kidney machines and hybrid road/rail buses.

Coates's influence in the wider Labour movement was a cause of growing concern to the Labour and trade union establishment. He was expelled from the Labour party for a period in 1965, while he was president of the Nottingham Labour party. Their anxiety grew when he was elected as a Labour member of the European Parliament in 1989.

He won great respect during his 10 years as an MEP, not least for his work as chairman of the human rights sub-committee and his initiatives for an EU-wide Pensioners' Parliament and Disabled People's Parliament, and a Convention for Full Employment, bringing together trade unionists and unemployed workers' organisations. Coates was a strong supporter of closer European integration, including adopting the euro.

The emergence of New Labour represented a serious setback for everything Coates stood for. His relations with the Labour leadership in London went from bad to worse when he voiced trenchant criticism of New Labour's turn to the right. This eventually led to his expulsion and that of his friend and fellow MEP, Hugh Kerr, from the party in 1998.

In later years, he maintained an intense workload as editor of The Spokesman, journal of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and in adding to his list of books and pamphlets about economic and political issues. He took immense pleasure in his family, the Derbyshire countryside and his network of friends and comrades, drawn to a man of great humour and culture as well as profound commitment.

He is survived by Tamara, his wife of more than 40 years, three daughters and three sons.

• Kenneth Sidney Coates, politician and writer, born 16 September 1930; died 27 June 2010

Tate Liverpool's new exhibition explores Picasso's politics. Despite his devotion to the French communists, the artist really subscribed only to a party of one – himself. By Alex Danchev

'Art is never chaste," said Pablo Picasso. "Art is dangerous." Picasso was not much of a speech-maker, but he could surely turn a phrase. His characteristic mode of intervention was single-burst point-scoring. He was a riddler. "Braque and James Joyce," he told Gertrude Stein, "are the incomprehensibles that anybody can understand." He relished the flip, the quip, the bon mot; he delighted in making mischief. "It's well-hung," he said, of a rival's exhibition. He who invented so much did not invent self-fashioning, but he is the supreme exemplar of artistic self-fashioning in modern times. He was a consummate self-publicist. "You can't be a sorcerer all day long," he remarked knowingly to André Malraux. It was but a short step from shaman to showman.

When it came to his art, he was serious as a pope. Towards the end of the second world war, he was goaded by an interviewer on the relationship between art and politics. He interrupted the interview to hurl himself on a piece of paper and scribble a statement, a mini-manifesto, so that he would not be misunderstood. "What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes if he's a painter, ears if he's a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he's a poet – or even, if he's a boxer, only some muscles? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, passionate or pleasing events in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How is it possible to be uninterested in other men and by virtue of what cold nonchalance can you detach yourself from the life that they supply so copiously? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy."

That flash of grandiloquence might be taken as the text for the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Picasso: Peace and Freedom, which sets out to explore the artist as a political being, through the causes he espoused, and above all through his commitment to the French Communist party (PCF), which he joined in 1944, with great fanfare, and never left. Picasso always hoped to go on for ever, and he very nearly did. In the course of a long lifetime (1881-1973) he had seen it all, from the Spanish-American war of 1898 to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He knew anarchists, bolshevists, socialists, communists, fascists, pacifists, falangists and Stalinists, to say nothing of cubists, futurists, dadaists, surrealists, suprematists, constructivists, destructivists and stridentists. He grew up with monarchism assailed by revolutionary anarchism; he grew old with republicanism served by monopoly capitalism. Ideologically, he had lived.

In the matter of the horrifying, he had form. Guernica (1937), then in the United States, was already a cause célèbre: "the Last Judgment of our age" or "Bolshevist art controlled by the hand of Moscow", it was gaining in iconic status with each passing decade. At the time of his outburst on the role of the artist, he was working on the most powerful political painting he ever made, The Charnel House (1944-45), the pièce de résistance of the Tate exhibition. Picasso himself said that the work was affected by revelations of the real-life charnel houses of the holocaust. In this instance there is no reason to doubt him.

The pages of his newspaper, the Communist daily L'Humanité, were full of graphic accounts of the camps, complete with illustrations. An article on the crematoria at Natzweiler-Struthof, near Strasbourg, included the macabre detail that the executioners had tied the hands and feet of their victims, like the central motif of the painting, and the heaped corpses in the death zone that constitutes the lower part of the canvas are reminiscent of the first shock photos of the camps – and of Goya's Disasters of War (1810-20), images at once unprintable and unforgettable. In the death zone, crucified innocence and clenched-fist defiance grapple with mass killing and dismemberment. The upper zone is less horrific, though no less eerie. Some elements of a contemporaneous still life enter in Pitcher, Candle and Casserole (1945) – the candle, symbol of hope, obliterated. The Charnel House is the offensive and defensive weapon deployed: memento mori, indictment, tribute to sacrifice, howl of despair, and proof positive of lyric poetry after Auschwitz.

The depth of his political engagement remains controversial, however, not least because it is still relatively unexplored. The Tate exhibition, master-minded by Lynda Morris, mounts a spirited defence of the artist as a principled political actor. As its title might suggest, Picasso: Peace and Freedom is almost an apologia. Inevitably, it raises more questions than it answers, but the questions themselves are important – what did Picasso stand for? – and in daring to place politics centre-stage (or centre-show) Morris and her collaborators challenge us once again to reappraise this protean and inexhaustible figure.

What are we to make of Picasso politico? He was nothing if not individualistic, but in this respect he exemplifies a general tendency: with few exceptions, the intellectual lives of the artists have not yet been written. Their mistresses command more attention than their mental furniture. This may reflect a certain condescension. Painters in particular are often supposed to be either stupid or vapid, and in any event inarticulate, unable or unwilling to explain themselves; some painters connive at this deception. As the anarchist and abstract expressionist Barnett Newman noted caustically: "The artist is approached not as an original thinker in his own medium but, rather, as an instinctive, intuitive executant, who, largely unaware of what he is doing, breaks through the mystery by the magic of his performance to 'express' truths the professionals think they can read better than he can himself."

In fact, many painters are lucid expositors and vivid writers, though few are as vivid as Van Gogh. Art and thought (even political thought) are not incompatible after all. But the politics of the palette are seldom as simple as red, white and blue. "It is not necessary to paint a man with a gun," declared Picasso. "An apple can be just as revolutionary."

As always, "Don Misterioso" is a hard case. His convictions are seldom spelt out; his intentions are frequently obscure. With Picasso, it was never one thing or the other. His meaning, like his motivation, was plural, inscrutable, unstable. "A green parrot is also a green salad . . . He who makes it only a parrot diminishes its reality. A painter who copies a tree blinds himself to the real tree. I see things otherwise. A palm tree can become a horse. Don Quixote can come into Las Meninas." With such a worldview, mapping belief is a tall order; and interpreting the painting is not likely to yield unambiguous conclusions. On canvas and in conversation, it is unwise to take him too literally. He could never remember whether he had said "I don't look, I find" or "I don't find, I look" – "not that it makes much difference ". Typically, the saying itself was appropriated or adapted from elsewhere – Picassified – in this case from Paul Valéry's Monsieur Teste. ("To find is nothing. The trick is to add to what you find.") As his friends and rivals well knew, he was a thievish genius. Pablo Picasso was a great finder. As a painter, he found objects. As a riddler, he found words.

As a sorcerer, he found politics. That is the lingering suspicion – a suspicion that in the end the politics were gesture politics, and not to be taken seriously; that the political beliefs were rather shallow; that communism itself was more or less meaningless to this heedless party member; that the peace-mongering was little more than political posturing; that the trademark dove and all the drawing and lithographing for the cause (well represented in the exhibition) was so much agitprop; that the saluting of Stalin and his henchmen, however idiosyncratic, was at best deluded; that this was at bottom a mercenary affair, whereby the world-renowned painter was exploited by the party for his famous name, his fleet brush, and his financial donations; in short, that Picasso was a useful idiot.

The donations were certainly substantial. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Picasso bankrolled the post-war French Communist party, and underwrote various causes associated with it. In 1949, for example, L'Humanité acknowledged his donation of one million francs for striking miners in the Pas de Calais. The party basked in the reflected glory, and pocketed the cash. One of its cells felicitously took his name: Cellule Interentreprise du Parti Communiste Français Pablo Picasso. His value as figurehead was priceless, as Picasso: Peace and Freedom justly highlights, but it may well be that his greatest contribution was financial. Yet here, too, a note of caution is in order. The donation to the striking miners, touted in the exhibition catalogue as an example of Picasso's anarchist principles, was matched by a donation to Fernande Olivier, his former mistress, in return for an undertaking that she would publish no more "Intimate Memories" in his lifetime. Fernande was destitute. She was bought off. Picasso's principles were not much troubled. According to the catalogue, "it could be argued that Picasso belonged to the wider 19th-century socialist and anarchist traditions of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Tolstoy, John Ruskin, William Morris and the Independent Labour party of Keir Hardie." That does not seem very plausible. The only thing Picasso had in common with Tolstoy is a work called War and Peace (a tub-thumping mural of 1952, for which he is not remembered). He knew more of hooliganism than anarchism. ("Picasso hooligan" was an epithet bandied around by his friends.) Moreover, one million francs, here or there, was not about to break the bank. Picasso was as rich as Croesus, and the means of production were safe in his hands.

Picasso's "committed" period is said to date from 1944, when he joined the party. His own account is a characteristic piece of self-fashioning. "I came to communism without the slightest hesitation, since ultimately, I had always been with it . . . Those years of dreadful oppression [the occupation] showed me that I had to fight not only through my art, but through my own person. I so wanted to return to my native land! I have always been an exile. Now I am one no longer; until Spain can at last welcome me back, the French Communist party opened its arms to me. I have found there all those whom I esteem the most, the greatest scientists, the greatest poets, and all those faces, so beautiful, of Parisians in arms which I saw during those days of August [1944, the liberation]. I am once more among my brothers."

What he found, in this touching fable, was his spiritual home. Yet plighting his troth to the party may have worried him more than he allowed. (The photograph accompanying the announcement is a picture of unease.) Marcelle Braque was convinced that he did not want to take the plunge on his own. Picasso spent a week with the Braques trying to persuade his old comrade from the cubist revolution to come in with him, and make a joint declaration. That would have been still more of a sensation, but Braque remained unmoved, even when appealed to by Simone Signoret. He had as much feeling for the workers of the world as did Picasso. But Braque was not a joiner. Adherence to parties and causes was not for him; only oysters adhere, as he once said. In any case, done like this, it smacked of a publicity stunt. The loathsome occupiers were on the run at last. This was the time for painting, not pantomime. Picasso's announcement was disappointing, possibly, but not unexpected. "It's hardly surprising that he should have joined the Communist party: it gives him a platform." The soap box was as unsuitable as the social whirl. "Picasso used to be a great painter," Braque observed. "Now he is merely a genius."

Picasso adhered, oyster-like, to the end. He attended congresses of Intellectuals for Peace, and even made a speech (against the persecution of his friend the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda), but the conscience-wrenching dramas of the cold war seemed to pass him by. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the Prague spring in 1968, he had nothing to say. In 1956 Czesław Miłosz wrote him an open letter. "No one knows what consequences a categorical protest from you might have had . . . If your support helped the terror, your indignation would also have mattered." Later in 1968, he drafted and then cancelled a statement for an article in Look magazine that tolled the bell on the political being: "I no longer understand the politics of the left and I have no wish to talk about it. I decided long ago that if I wanted to deal with such matters I should have to change profession and go into politics. But of course that is impossible."

Picasso painted furiously for peace. As art, much of this work was unworthy of him. Picasso: Peace and Freedom proposes boldly to circumvent this flaw by co-opting The Women of Algiers (1955), Las Meninas (1957), the variations on Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1959-62) and The Rape of the Sabine Women (1962-63), and sundry mothers (for peace) and musketeers (for war), with ingenious suggestions of contemporary political comment. Thus Las Meninas becomes "an indictment of Franco's dictatorship and his royalist aspirations" or "a satirical comment on contemporary Spain, as cruel in its condemnation of the Spanish monarchy as Goya's caricatures". The exhibition is immeasurably enriched, but nagging questions persist.

Picasso is perhaps best seen as a kind of political sleeper. His slavish devotions to the servile French communists notwithstanding, his true commitment was to the Cézannists. "Even a casserole can scream!" he said of The Charnel House. "Everything can scream! A simple bottle! And Cézanne's apples!" In the final analysis, however, he was already spoken for. Pablo Picasso, a painter without peer, lived and died an egotist. A party of one was his ideal station.

Picasso: Peace and Freedom is at Tate Liverpool from 21 May to 30 August (0151 702 7400). www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/ Picasso: The Mediterranean Years opens on 4 June at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London WC1 (020 7841 9960).

Plus: Football v Natural disasters (2); the international venue merry-go-round; and the closest league season ever. Send your questions and answers to knowledge@guardian.co.uk

"With the general election approaching," begins Doug Webster, "I was wondering whether any politicians had been decent footballers. And did any footballers go on to be decent politicians? If such a thing exists."

We have looked this before (Footballers pursuing political careers George Weah, Pele, Zico, Oleg Blokhin and Marc Wilmots all covered) but with election day in the UK so close at hand it's worth having a look at few others who have swapped the dressing room for the dispatch box. Or at least tried to.

One of the unsuccessful candidates was Andrey Arshavin, who ran on a pro-Kremlin ticket for Vladimir Putin's United Russia party in regional council elections in Russia in 2007. Though the Arsenal forward (then at Zenit St Petersburg) withdrew his candidacy before a vote was cast, his international team-mate Roman Pavlyuchenko did keep his name in the hat in 2008 and was elected to the regional council in his home town of Stavropol.

"I suspect one of the highest profile players to turn his hand to politics must have been Josef Boszik, legendary wing half of the legendary Hungarian side of the 1950s," writes David Warriston. "Boszik, a boyhood neighbour of Puskas who once said he could find a Boszik pass in the darkness, was a member of the Hungarian parliament for several years in the 1960s. He had the option of turning his back on Hungary when the revolution broke out in 1956 but decided to return.

"So too did Gyula Grosics the goalkeeper, who after the collapse of the Soviet regime was a spokesman for a right wing political group. Perhaps he can be forgiven because a few months after the 1954 World Cup final he was arrested for treason no less, and put under house arrest for 18 months. Presumably the commissars felt he should have got down quicker to Helmut Rahn's rasping low drive."

Staying with the mighty Magyars, the Hungarian prime minister elect Viktor Orban is a keen amateur player with Felcsut FC and cancelled a cabinet meeting so that he could participate in his club's mid-season training camp in 2001. "You could even sign him in Football Manager 2006," writes Dave Edwards.

Mark Hayden writes in with a remarkably detailed CV of Olli Rehn, Finnish MP and MEP, currently serving as European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, who played football for his hometown club Mikkelin Palloilijat in Finland's top division. And Robert Marriott has news of Rev Robert Bradford, the Ulster Unionist MP for South Belfast in the 70s, who played for Glenavon and Distillery in his youth.

But it's not just eager amateurs who after hanging up their boots throw on a pair of smart leather shoes, start ringing doorbells and ask if they can rely on your vote. Following the path trodden by Pele and Zico from joga bonito to the somewhat less bonito world of Brazilian politics is Romario, who, writes Admir Pajic, has recently announced he's running for congress with the Brazilian Socialist Party. ""My principal objective is to work with all my strength to aid impoverished children," said the former striker,

And finally there's Gianni Rivera, the Italy forward who played in four World Cups (1962. 1966, 1970 and 1974), won 60 caps for his country, played over 500 times for Milan and holds two European Cup winners' medals. "You'd be hard pressed to say he wasn't a decent footballer," writes Roger Kay. "He later entered the Italian Parliament and later a Euro MP. Whether he is a decent politician is another matter: how does one judge such things?" How indeed.

FOOTBALL v NATURAL DISASTERS (2)

Last week we looked at football falling foul of natural disasters (lightning, hurricanes and the like, rather than the obese WWF tag-team of the early 1990s.) As ever, the Knowledge inbox has been filling up with those "I can't believe you missed ..." emails.

Not a natural disaster as such, but a freak gust of wind caused the suspension of a Premiership fixture between Orlando Pirates and Black Leopards at Ellis Park in 2007. Play was abandoned for five minutes after advertising hoardings flew across the pitch, injuring several players. It had been something of a troubled fixture:Kick-off had to be delayed by 15 minutes because of a power cut and seven minutes after the resumption of proceedings following the wind break the game was abandoned due to torrential rain.

Niel Butler emails in with this rather terrifying clip of a dust devil interrupting a children's game, and no less scary in its own way is this footage of bees-stopped-play from Chrostopher Watling.

"On 28 August 2008 during the inaugural season of Concacaf's Champions League a play-off round match between Mexico's UNAM and the Jamaican club Harbour View was cancelled after Tropical Storm Gustav (later upgraded to hurricane status) slammed into Jamaica," writes David Downs. "Later that same tournament, the group phase match between Houston Dynamo and El Salvador's Luis Angel Firpo was postponed several weeks when Hurricane Ike prevented them from playing in Houston in September."

VENUE MERRY-GO-ROUND

"I've been doing some poking about," confesses Ali Houston, "and apparently over the years Scotland and Wales have played against each other in 24 different venues. Is this an international (or inter-team) record? My poking has discovered that we've only played England in 20 grounds, so don't even try starting there."

Mexico and the USA can match Scotland and Wales, reckons Jesse Ziter, with the neighbours meeting in 24 different venues (deep breath): Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada; Columbus Crew Stadium, Columbus, Ohio; Cotton Bowl, Dallas, Texas; Estadio Azteca, Mexico City; Estadio de los Deportes, Mexico City; Estadio Neza '86, Mexico City; Estadio Parque Artigas, Paysandú, Uruguay; Estadio Tecnológico, Monterrey, Nuevo León; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Foxboro Stadium, Foxboro, Massachusetts; Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey; Havana, Cuba; Invesco Field at Mile High, Denver, Colorado; Jeonju World Cup Stadium, Jeonju, South Korea; Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, California; Monterrey, Nuevo León; Puebla, Puebla; Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego, California; Reliant Stadium, Houston, Texas; RFK Stadium, Washington; Rose Bowl, Pasadena, California; Soldier Field, Chicago, Illinois; Stadio Nazionale, Rome, Italy; University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Arizona.

Brett Taylor can beat that, however, with Australia v New Zealand. "As soon as I read it I thought Australia v New Zealand might be in with a chance of beating that. My digging was made easy by the excellent ozfootball.net website and it confirmed my suspicions. According to that site the Socceroos have met the All Whites at 35 different venues, in six different countries including the obvious two and Indonesia, Vietnam, Tahiti and England. One or two may be the same venue with a changed name, I'm not certain. We're set to play them again on 24 May at the Melbourne Cricket Ground which I think will be the 36th venue."

Right, here we go in chronological order (even deeper breath): Carisbrooke Park, Dunedin; Athletic Park, Wellington; Domain (now Carlaw Park), Auckland; Brisbane Cricket Ground; Sydney Cricket Ground; Newcastle Showground; Exhibition Ground, Brisbane; Basin Reserve, Wellington; Blandford Park, Auckland; Lancaster Park, Christchurch; Melbourne Showgrounds; Sydney Sports Ground; Cong Hoa Stadium, Saigon, South Vietnam; Senayan Stadium, Jakarta, Indonesia; Newmarket Ground, Auckland; Olympic Park, Melbourne; Mount Smart Stadium, Auckland; Parramatta Stadium, Sydney; Hutt Recreation Ground, Lower Hutt; Sydney Football Stadium; Athletics Park, Wellington; Caledonian Ground, Dunedin; Queen Elizabeth Oval, Bendigo; QEII Stadium, Christchurch; Hindmarsh Stadium, Adelaide; Breakers Stadium, Newcastle; Lakeside Stadium, Melbourne; North Harbour Stadium, Auckland; Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane; Papeete, Tahiti; Westpac Trust Stadium, Wellington; Stadium Australia, Sydney; Ericsson Stadium, Auckland; Craven Cottage, London.

A worthy effort, but here's Tim Dockery. "I spent too long a time on such a short answer," he writes, somewhat missing the point of this column, though we'll forgive him. "But here goes: Argentina and Brazil have played each other 94 times in 41 stadiums in 27 cities in 16 countries."

The details of which can all be found at the brilliant Brazil RSSSF site. Or below (extremely deep breath):

Estádio das Laranjeiras, Rio de Janeiro; Campo do Velódromo, São Paulo; Club Gimnasia y Esgrima, Buenos Aires; Parque Pereira, Montevidéo; Campo do Sporting Club, Viña del Mar (Chile); Campo do Barracas, Buenos Aires; Central Parque, Montevidéo; Estádio do San Lorenzo de Almagro, Buenos Aires; Estádio de São Januário, Rio de Janeiro; Parque Antártica, São Paulo; Estádio do Independiente, Buenos Aires; Estádio Centenário, Montevidéu; Estádio Nacional, Santiago (Chile); Estádio do Pacaembu, São Paulo; Estádio Monumental de Núñez, Buenos Aires; Estádio Olímpico, Cidade do México (Mexico); Estádio do Racing, Buenos Aires; Estádio Nacional, Lima; Estádio do Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro; Estádio Olímpico, Guayaquil (Ecuador); Estádio Nacional da Costa Rica, San José; Estádio Hernán Siles Zuazo, La Paz; Estádio do Morumbi, São Paulo; Estádio Mineirão, Belo Horizonte; Estádio Beira-Rio, Porto Alegre; Niedersachsenstadion, Hannover; Estádio Cordeleon, Rosario; Estádio Rosário Central, Rosário; Estádio Sarriá, Barcelona (Spain); Estádio da Fonte Nova, Salvador; Olimpic Park, Melbourne (Australia); Stadio Delle Alpi, Turin; Estádio Vélez Sarsfield, Buenos Aires; Estádio Pinheirão, Curitiba; Estádio Monumental, Guayaquil; Estádio do Arruda, Recife; Estádio Attilio Paiva Oliveira, Rivera (Uruguay); Estádio Tres de Febrero, Ciudad de Leste (Paraguay); Estádio do Beira-Rio, Porto Alegre; Waldstadion, Frankfurt; Emirates Stadium, London; Estádio José Pachencho Romero, Maracaibo (Venezuela); Estádio Mundialista, Rosário

KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE

"After the Chelsea game yesterday, Sky Sports were saying this was the first time since the Premier League's inception that the top two teams have gone into the last game on the same points," wrote Terry Chops back in the halcyon days of 2008. "But how many times has it happened before that in the English top flight? And has there ever been a season when the top three teams went into the last game on the same points total, or even the top four?"

Yes. Back in 1968, it was level-pegging as Manchester City and Manchester United began their last matches on May 11. Under joint managers Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison, City overcame Newcastle 4-3 in a sensational match while United were turned over 2-1 at Old Trafford by Sunderland.

For further examples you must hark back to the sepia-tinted days of yesteryear when folk wore hats and lived life in a fast and jerky fashion. The year is 1950 and bums in the Midlands and on the south coast are squeakier than the door in Michael Jackson's "Thriller".

Wolverhampton Wanderers and Portsmouth are going into the final weekend level on 51 points with Portsmouth top owing to a superior yet very slim goal average (goals scored divided by goals against). When they thumped bottom-placed rivals Birmingham City 6-1, Wolves must have thought they'd done enough but a 5-1 home win against mid-table Aston Villa saw Portsmouth clinch the title by two-fifths of a goal.

The 1914-15 season was a good one for Everton with Liverpool embroiled in a dodgy betting scandal and the Toffees crowned champions. Thanks in no small part to Bobby Parker, who scored 35 goals in 36 games, Everton were neck-and-neck with Oldham and only separated by a wafer-thin goal average. On the last day of the season, they stumbled rather than strode across the finishing line with a 2-2 draw that, with Oldham choking in a 2-0 defeat, was just enough.

At the end of the 19th century, the fixture computer gave fans a last-game, winner-takes-all title-decider by pairing Aston Villa against Liverpool - both teams level on 43 points. A superior Villa goal average meant Liverpool had to go for the win but got nowhere near. Villa dished out a 5-0 drubbing and partied like it was 1899, for that's what it was.

In the nearest thing to memorable top-of-the-table threesome nail-biter, the 1904-05 season was a corker. Everton had a point advantage and having played a game more than title-chasing rivals Newcastle and Manchester City (these were the days before Super Sundays on Sky) were reliant on both teams losing. Manchester City obliged with a 2-3 reverse but Newcastle beat Middlesbrough 3-0 to be crowned champions. That's when the top flight was exciting, eh Kev?

For thousands more questions and answers take a trip through the Knowledge archive

Can you help?

"Here in Portland, USA, tonight brings a strange occurrence," writes Zach Dundas. "The NBA's Phoenix Suns play our Trail Blazers in a playoff game; at the same time, in the decidedly more modest second-division football league (or United States Soccer Federation Division II Pro League, if you want to get technical), our beloved Timbers face a home fixture against regional rivals Vancouver Whitecaps. As everyone knows, the Suns are led by Steve Nash, a Canadian Tottenham fan (surely not the only one). As far fewer people know, the Whitecaps feature Martin Nash, Steve's brother. Two brothers playing in different sports in away matches against teams in the same city, at exactly the same time. Has this ever happened before?"

"During this January's FA Trophy fixture between Cambridge United and Eastbourne Borough, U's striker Danny Crow scored an own goal to put Eastbourne 2-0 up before scoring two penalties at the correct end," writes Matt Ramsey. "Having watched the match DVD I was able to time the speed at which he scored at both ends, having scored the first penalty only 99 seconds after putting through his own net. Is this a record?"

"This season Altetico Madrid have reached the final of the Europa League, despite winning only two of their 14 European matches this season," notes Christopher Betteridge. "Have a side ever reached a major final by winning fewer matches than this?"

"Norwich's 3-0 away win at Bristol Rovers today means we've scored in every league away game for the entire season," writes Ffion Thomas. "How often has this feat been achieved?"

"With Bayern all but securing the Bundesliga title at the weekend, Arjen Robben has won four different league titles in four different European countries," says Kriz Walsh. "Aside from Mateja Kezman, have there been instances of other players winning four titles in four different countries, or even five?"

Send your questions and answers to knowledge@guardian.co.uk

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia is given a dramatic reworking. By Tibor Fischer

It's nice to have an unreliable narrator fess up straight away. The tar in Jáchym Topol's title is a reference to the coal-tar soap the nuns at the narrator's orphanage use as a punishment for bad language or lying. Crawling out from under the shadow of Kundera, a new generation of Czech novelists is reaching the Anglo-Saxon world, and Topol is one of the most rated writers in Prague.

His novel is divided into two sections. First we have an account of life in an orphanage initially run by nuns which is then turned into a sort of military academy by communist war veterans. The second section follows the adventures of Ilya as the Warsaw pact invades Czechoslovakia in 1968 to put an end to Dubcek's "socialism with a human face".

Perhaps it's my ignorance, but certainly in the Czech literature in translation I've come across, there's been relatively little that covers the story of 1968 directly. The after-effects, yes. As a sideshow, yes. But tales about rumbling tanks, not so much. Big events often require time for digestion. There's still not much about the Hungarian revolution of 1956 in Hungarian fiction and if the great Solidarity novel has been written, I'm unaware of it.

The citizens of Czechoslovakia might not have been pro-Russian or pro-communist, but they were certainly more sympathetic to those views than the Poles or the Hungarians. Of sound dissident stock, Topol is too young to remember much about 1968, but he does a good job of conjuring up the atmosphere of the late 50s and 60s. There is a great chasm between the two sections of the novel, however. The orphanage section is extremely evocative; its tone is realistic and could be roughly characterised as Lord of the Flies in the Bohemian countryside, with satirical jibes at Catholicism and communism evenly distributed.

The second section is so different that it's as if Topol got tired of writing the novel he had started. As the Soviet tanks pour into Czechoslovakia, it's suddenly pure Svejk. Ilya ends up working as a guide for the invaders and has a number of far-fetched, picaresque misadventures as he repeatedly switches sides. The French and German editions of this novel have the title "Circus Zone", because there is a running joke involving various circus acts from other Warsaw pact countries (dead Hungarian hippos, East German dwarves) – the gag being that the Soviets felt they shouldn't just invade, they should offer something cultural by way of consolation. In addition, "This region is to witness the realisation of the ancient dream of the Czechoslovak masses. There will be a sea here. It will be the Czech sea, as a gift from ordinary Soviet people to the ordinary people of Czechoslovakia." (Evidently the Czechs haven't recovered from Shakespeare's solecism about "the coast of Bohemia".)

The satire is so unrestrained in the second section, I have no doubt I missed many allusions and jokes, or didn't appreciate them fully (Czech nationalism seems to get a kicking, inter alia). This is my one reservation. I've logged up plenty of time in Wenceslas Square and I nodded with recognition throughout Gargling With Tar. I can see why this novel was so well received at home, but I wonder whether British readers will comprehend enough of the sub-text (or even the text) to make their reading pleasurable. It's a polished performance, but not one for beginners in Bohemia.

Tibor Fischer's Good to be God is published by Alma Books.

FOR years, the eighth district was considered one of the worst in Budapest. Decimated during World War II and still pocked by bullets from the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the district -- also known as Jozsefvaros or Joseph Town -- was synonymous with theft and prostitution.

FOR years, the eighth district was considered one of the worst in Budapest . Decimated during World War II and still pocked by bullets from the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the district - also known as Jozsefvaros or Joseph Town - was synonymous with theft and prostitution.

Arthur Koestler’s centenary in 2005 was barely noticed in Britain. The man who was one of the first to understand the inhumanity  of communism and the danger of appeasing the Soviet Union, whose turbulent life seems to have touched all the major events of the 20th century and whose books were bestsellers in Europe and America has been as good as forgotten in the country which adopted him in 1940 and where he lived till his suicide in 1983.

Arthur Koestler’s centenary in 2005 was barely noticed in Britain

The reasons for this are complex. Koestler’s own break with politics in the 1950s, his shift from writing  novels to writing about science and his interest in the paranormal in later years are certainly among them.  Another factor is David Cesarani’s reputation-damaging biography “The Homeless Mind”, published in 1998, which caught the popular imagination and made readers think of Koestler  primarily as a serial rapist or worse. But, more importantly, the near oblivion of this remarkable figure seems to stem from an apparently universal reluctance to contemplate the intellectual battles of the 20th century and their consequences for our time.

Michael Scammell’s  600-page biography seeks to redress the balance. It is not polemical in tone, but his detailed and objective portrait of the man, writer and thinker, based on  two hundred interviews, previously unpublished  private letters and diaries and valuable material from the archives,  proves surprisingly convincing. 

A Way of Seeing

Koestler wrote  about the first 35 years of his life  in the two volumes of his autobiography, “The Arrow in the Blue” and “The Invisible Writing”. A lonely childhood in Budapest, where, aged 14, he witnessed  1919 communist revolution; his education at the Vienna Polytechnic; a passionate interest in Zionism stirred up by the writings of Vladimir Jabotinsky.  A trip to Palestine, the beginnings of journalism. Then disappointment with Zionism, and  return to Europe. A brilliant career as a science correspondent  in Berlin with the publishing tycoon Ullstein, which culminated in his reporting from the Graf Zeppelin  on its first flight to the North Pole.

Then came a passionate attraction to communism;  an eighteen month stay in the Soviet Union; anti-fascist propaganda work in Paris for the Comintern leader Willi Munzenberg, who sent him on assignments to  Spain several times  during the Civil War. An arrest and ninety days in Seville prison, which proved a life-changing event. Then his break with the Communist party, internment in France, and finally a narrow escape from the advancing Nazis via Casablanca and Lisbon to Britain.

The autobiography, which is among Koestler’s finest works, gives an honest account of how he saw his extraordinary life and himself in 1952. However,  a biographer armed with a wealth of documents is in a position to see more and  to analyse what is behind the narrative, especially when dealing with a writer, who, as Scammell remarks, “loved to see his life in terms of burned bridges and leaping off cliffs, blinding revelations and psychological revolutions”.

First of all, with the help of  numerous memoirs, he lets us look at the writer through other people’s eyes: an ambitious, adventurous, boisterous, courageous and often aggressive young man, perceived by a woman (Eva Striker) as ”romantic, charitable and loving”  and by a male friend, who managed to  see through him (Manes Sperber), as touchy  and painfully insecure. “ His lower lip invariably trembled after he had made an especially aggressive or deprecating remark about someone. There was a contradiction in his blue eyes as well: they reflected mockery and self-irony, and then, suddenly, an uncommon sensitivity and fear of deception and disappointment, fear that a pain one cannot prepare for could destroy one’s strength to bear it”.

Scammell also suggests that Koestler’s  life changes were not necessarily as swift as he describes, especially the most important one in his life – his  conversion to communism  and rejection of it.  Taking the decision to join the Communist party took Koestler about a year. He was drawn to it  by a group of Berlin friends gathered around his childhood friend from Budapest  and later – although no longer - his lover, Eva  Striker, and  also by reading the classics of Marxism –Leninism, which led him to experience a semi-mystical excitement, exactly the same as he felt when embracing Zionism.  His taste for black and white political solutions  prompted  an unequivocal answer to the popular question of the day “Germany - Fascist or Soviet?” And  after becoming a Party member  he was excited by its secretive world and “warm comradeship”, all of which, as Scammell puts it, “appealed to his romantic temperament”.

Koestler kept faith with the cause even on his trip to the Soviet Union. For a sharp-eyed journalist  it must have required a special effort not to notice the poverty and  hardships of the country in 1932-33, but, as Koestler was writing a propaganda work about the Soviet miracle, he developed a special vision which allowed him to ascribe anything good that he saw to the  achievements of the party and anything bad to lingering traces of the tsarist past. Unlike “ Winter in Moscow”, a book by the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge  who was in the Soviet Union at  exactly the same time, Koestler’s “White Nights and Red Days”  did not touch on the famine in Ukraine  or any other subjects undesirable for his Soviet hosts. It is not that he did not see these things - he did and was able to remember them many years later - but in conversations with his  Berlin friends, the same  Eva Striker and  her husband, physicist Alexander  Weissberg, who  were now living in Kharkov, he, and they too, tried to justify the need to be loyal to the regime by fear of counterrevolution.

Parting with illusions.

His break with communism, a pivotal moment of his life, was described many times by Koestler himself, but Scammell manages to add vital details to this too. He stresses that although to the end of his stay in the Soviet Union Koestler outwardly kept to the party line, seeds of doubt had already been planted in the 28-year-old communist, whose book incidentally was rejected by Soviet publishers as” frivolous and light-hearted”. This is clear from the fact that in the last weeks of his stay in the USSR, and on the train back to Europe, he was furiously writing a play about the nature of utopia and a couple of years later was re-examining his arguments about communism in a forgotten novel for children.

The real turning point, however, came later after his “dialogue with death”, his three month imprisonment in Spain, when he was “an almost daily eyewitness  of the execution of his comrades and awaited his own execution at any moment”. It was then that Koestler suddenly fully understood the meaning of revolutionary violence and the value of human life.

This breakthrough received forceful support from an unexpected quarter: in September 1937 Eva Striker was expelled from the Soviet Union as an undesirable alien. Her miraculous escape, as she told Koestler when she saw him in London, had been preceded by her arrest, a charge of plotting to assassinate Stalin, and 18 months in solitary confinement, punctuated by interrogations. The uncanny similarity of their experiences, Koestler’s in a fascist cell, Eva’s in a communist one, was reflected in the opening pages of “Darkness at Noon”, where Rubashov on waking up can’t immediately understand what prison he is in. Scammell sensitively remarks that the affinity between the  two systems was first grasped by Koestler on an emotional level, because  when he was writing these pages he was not yet ready to acknowledge it consciously.

His letter of resignation from the German Communist party, which explained how disgusted he was with “the degradation” of the party and the immorality of the revolutionary ethics of “ the ends justify the means”, ended with the hope that “the  Soviet Union is  the foundation of the future”. The letter was written in April 1938, 16 months before the Soviet-Nazi pact, which crushed any remaining illusions.

The novel originated as a response to the confessions of improbable crimes made by old Bolsheviks 

A Lonely Fight

From that moment and for the next eleven years Koestler put  much of his energy into attempts to explain the dangers of communism. He wrote “The Vicious Circle“( the original title of “Darkness at Noon”) while awaiting arrest in France and  during his internment in the Le Vernet camp as an “undesirable alien”. The novel originated as a response to the confessions of improbable crimes made by old Bolsheviks (in particular Bukharin, whom Koestler knew) at Stalin’s show trials. It analyses thoroughly the psychological mechanisms which make a man convince himself  that he is wrong and the party is right and exposes the ultimate damage done by communist ideology. The book was translated from the original German into English at breakneck speed and sent to Britain, while its author had to flee from the approaching Nazis. His next book, “Scum of the Earth”, written immediately after his escape - and the first one written in English - combines an account of his internment and flight with his reflections on the capitulation of France and the Soviet-Nazi pact.

The books were well received, yet Koestler’s active nature demanded much more. Just as in 1944 he was ready to go to Budapest to save Hungarian Jews from the inevitable gas-chambers and went to Palestine trying to ensure that it would become a home for Jewish survivors, he wanted  practical measures to be taken against the Soviet threat which he began to perceive at  about the same time, before the war ended. However, and  Scammell makes a point of showing this, despite Koestler’s growing fame and his friendship with many influential people in Britain his warnings about it were not taken seriously. Moreover, the general tendency of the time was to admire the Russians for their valour and victories in the war and nobody  wished to remember either the brutality of their show-trials or even their alliance with Hitler, when they supplied the petrol for German planes to bomb British cities.

Koestler was outraged  when in 1944 the Soviet army did not come to the aid of the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, but could not get an article about it published, because the newspaper owner did not want to offend the Russians.  He watched a debate in the House of Commons and was stunned to hear about plans to “reward” the Soviet Union with the post-war partition of Germany. Scammell gives his diary entry: “Nobody seemed aware that “the future frontiers of  Soviet Poland “ would run “only a few miles east of Berlin. In two years it will be a natural deduction. If I said it aloud today, nobody would believe me and I would probably be interned”. Feeling like a Cassandra whose predictions fell on deaf ears, Koestler could only  try yet again to explain what he meant by writing a series of essays: “Anatomy of a Myth”, “Soviet Myth and Reality” and “The End of an Illusion”, which were published in the collection “The Yogi and the Commissar” in 1945.

If one man in England was a natural ally of Koestler’s it was George Orwell, who at the same time was getting rejections from British publishers unwilling to print “Animal Farm” for the same fear of offending the Russians.  Scammell describes an unlikely friendship between the two difficult and completely different  men, based on a brutal honesty. The day after Orwell published  a very critical review of Koestler’s play “The Twilight Bar” he came to stay with him for a week. “Koestler wondered why Orwell hadn’t mitigated his harsh remarks with a single redeeming phrase and was expecting Orwell to say something in the car, but Orwell said nothing and they rode in silence. Finally Koestler blurted out: “That was a bloody awful review you wrote, wasn’t it?” “Yes” said Orwell, “and it’s a bloody awful play, isn’t it?” It was to Orwell that Koestler came to with a project to start a successor to the old League for the Rights of Man, which could allow intellectuals to have some influence on politics. Orwell enthusiastically wrote a manifesto, but their attempts to enlist others came to nothing in the end.

Gathering Forces

By the end of the 1940s, however, former communists in different countries had discovered each other. They realized they had knowledge that other people did not have and felt it was their duty to share it. As Koestler famously said to the Labour politician and author Richard Crossman: “You comfortable, insular, Anglo-Saxon anti-communists…hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies, but when all is said, we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about”. It was out of this sentiment that the volume “The God that Failed” originated. It carried the subtitle  “Six Studies in Communism”, was edited by Richard Crossman  and contained essays by Koestler, Andre Gide, Stephen Spender, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright and Louis Fisher, who all told their stories of disillusionment with communism.

Communism meanwhile was gaining ground in the West. The Soviet propaganda machine wasted no time in mounting a huge ideological offensive, with the new Cominform agency  and peace conferences  and mass rallies, with Picasso’s dove as symbol, in New York and Paris. And they did not lack support among the intelligentsia, especially the French, gripped as they were by anti-Americanism. At this point it was not just Koestler, but  a number of American and European ex-communists - Sidney Hook, Ignazio Silone, Franz Borkenau  and others - who felt the urgent  need for  a counter-attack, and  their efforts  led to the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The Congress, one of the most remarkable initiatives of the 20th century, a union of European and American intellectuals striving to preserve liberal values, was  discredited, particularly in Britain, years later when in 1967at the height of the Vietnam war, its CIA funding became a sensational  public discovery. Today, a favourable account of the Congress by Peter Coleman, ”The Liberal Conspiracy” (1989) is largely forgotten and a more recent hostile book by Francis Stonor Saunders, “Who Paid the Piper” (1999), further helped to block out a worldwide movement for the defence of human rights and  free exchange of ideas as an unpleasant historical blot. Michael Scammell’s biography  gives a completely new  picture of its origins and its influence on Koestler’s life.

Triumph  and Rejection

The Congress’s founding conference,  attended by about a hundred leading writers, scholars and scientists from different countries, was due to take place in West  Berlin at the end of June 1950. A copy of the programme made its way to Washington and the newly-founded CIA agreed to fund it. At this point very few people knew about the CIA connection, perhaps, as Scammell suggests, because the CIA was so new and little known, but they knew they were funded by some branch of the American government. However the paradox exposed by Scammell’s research was that the CIA was actually pleading for less overt anti-communism than the conference organisers seemed to desire.

Koestler, naturally, became heart and soul of it all. He actively participated in  the preparations, wrote several papers, including the main document of the Congress, a “Freedom Manifesto”, and  spoke at the conference several times. Its opening  coincided with news of the communist North Korean army’s invasion of  South Korea, and its participants felt they were on the eve of global conflict. This lent more urgency to proceedings and the Congress concluded with a public rally, attended by about fifteen thousand people. It was there that Koester read out his Manifesto and finished by shouting in German, “Friends, freedom has seized the initiative!”, to the delight of the audience. He was entirely in his element and it was acknowledged  that the conference  owed its success largely to him.

At this point Koestler thought he might take six months off from his writing and devote himself entirely to the new organisation. He was hoping to create a Radio network, which he nicknamed “Deminform” as opposed to the Soviet “Cominform”, and to send books to the  countries of the Eastern bloc. He was also thinking of establishing committees  in all the large provincial towns of France,  to put up anti-Communist posters and organize mass meetings on subjects like the Korean war and Yugoslavia. In short, he was eager to use all his energy and  experience to serve the cause he believed in passionately.

And suddenly all this was over. Just two months after the opening conference Koestler handed in his  resignation from the Congress. The mystery of what happened has never been solved. Scammell  does not offer an explanation, but  just  some known facts: Koestler’s nervous breakdown, which preceded his resignation;  his later confession  in a letter to Manes Sperber that he had not withdrawn from the Congress, but had been made to withdraw “in a very gentle and effective way”; and  a letter by his former  American friend and sponsor James Burnham to the CIA, where he explained that Koestler with his “neurotic personality” was more of a liability than an asset. The biographer suspects that CIA bureaucrats must have found Koestler too militant and too difficult to control for their comfort.  A hint from a Congress colleague that he was not welcome must have profoundly disappointed and hurt Koestler, and the nervous breakdown that followed was read by him as a “warning from fate” directing him – as it had happened before - to move to the next stage of his life.

The Right Decision?

It was just a couple of  years later - after writing his autobiography – that Koestler  announced: “Cassandra has grown hoarse” and retired  from politics altogether.

It could not have been easy for a man of his temperament and energy to suddenly stop all his activity. And he carried some of it on, only not in the sphere of international politics. The only thing that was a continuation of his previous initiatives was the fund he created, with the royalties from his play based on “Darkness at Noon”,  to help intellectuals who had fled  from Eastern Europe: the Romanian playwright  Eugene Ionesco, Polish poet Czeslav Milosz, Russian writers Bunin and Remizov  and the Russian émigré periodical “Literaturny Sovremennik” (“Literary Contemporary”) were among its beneficiaries. In the mid-fifties he started a campaign for the abolition of capital punishment in Britain and when it was finally abolished in 1970 it was widely acknowledged that it was Koestler’s efforts and his book “Reflections on Hanging” that helped to change public opinion.

But when the Hungarians revolted against Soviet rule in  Autumn 1956, Koestler, after an initial surge of energy which made him drive to the Hungarian embassy at night, advise the editor of “Encounter “on what needed to be done and help to organise a meeting of support for the uprising, refused to make any public speeches or sign any public protests. Scammell makes it unambiguously clear that this was “a rare tactical mistake on Koestler’s part which “deprived the Hungarians of a matchless powerful advocate”. Yet on seeing the western governments  distracted by the Suez crisis and Hungary forgotten, Koestler congratulated himself on the correctness of his decision to quit politics and remain silent.

The remaining nearly thirty years of Koestler’s life are carefully described by Scammell with his usual  remarkable  ability to blend the private and  public  domains. Koestler did not seem to have regretted his decision  and in his old age  used to get angry when he  was still greeted as the author of “Darkness at Noon”, claiming that his achievements of later years were no less important.

The Congress  for Cultural Freedom and other organisations  eventually implemented some of Koestler’s proposals on how to fight back the against communism, although without crediting him for them. Koestler, as Scammell repeatedly points out, was in most cases far ahead of his time – and his ideas  were put into practice only when public opinion became ready to accept them. What  was not appreciated at the time, and not  learnt from later, was Koestler’s unique capacity for seeing the political situation as it is was at a given  moment and for predicting its further development. Trapped within the conventional  notions of left- right, communism - anticommunism, anti-Russian  - anti-American, most western intellectuals failed to grasp what started happening after the collapse of the Soviet Union and missed the revival of old totalitarian ways in new incarnations.

Michael Scammell. “Koestler. The Indispensable Intellectual.” Faber and Faber.2010

Masha Karp is Russian born journalist based in London

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Stephen Koch Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the seduction of the intellectuals, NY: Free Press 1994

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, Vintage Classics, 1998

George Orwell, Animal Farm, Signet Classic, 1996

Malcolm Muggeridge, Winter in Moscow, Little Brown, 2002

Michael Scammell’s web site

A Life of Ignazio Silone by Stanislao G. Pugliese, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2009, 448 pages

The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress For Cultural Freedom And The Struggle For The Mind Of Postwar Europe, by Peter Coleman, Free Press 1989, 333 pages

Related stories: 

Far Away from Moscow

The posthumous victory of socialist realism

The Embrace of Stalinism

oD-wide classification

Country: 

Russia

Topics: 

Civil society

Culture

The last successful Conservative administration, under Mrs Thatcher, made great progress in attacking the classical Left, by reining in the trade unions at home, and confronting the Soviet Union abroad. What Mrs Thatcher didn’t realise was that the Left had already begun to attack on other fronts.

“The collapse of communism was actually a slow-burning process. Its moral and political bankruptcy became obvious decades before that glorious Berlin day in November 1989.

For many communist fellow travellers, the scales fell from their eyes when the Hungarian uprising was crushed in 1956. Others, over the years, lost faith not just in communism but in its less radical sister, socialism, as their core tenet of ‘equality’ proved itself in a myriad different ways to be the enemy of freedom and justice, with market forces appearing to carry the torch of liberty instead.

But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down.

This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.

This key insight was developed in particular by an Italian Marxist philosopher called Antonio Gramsci. His thinking was taken up by Sixties radicals — who are, of course, the generation that holds power in the West today.

Gramsci understood that the working class would never rise up to seize the levers of ‘production, distribution and exchange’ as communism had prophesied. Economics was not the path to revolution.

He believed instead that society could be overthrown if the values underpinning it could be turned into their antithesis: if its core principles were replaced by those of groups who were considered to be outsiders or who actively transgressed the moral codes of that society.

So he advocated a ‘long march through the institutions’ to capture the citadels of the culture and turn them into a collective fifth column, undermining from within and turning all the core values of society upside-down and inside-out.

This strategy has been carried out to the letter.

The nuclear family has been widely shattered. Illegitimacy was transformed from a stigma into a ‘right’. The tragic disadvantage of fatherlessness was redefined as a neutrally-viewed ‘lifestyle choice’.

Education was wrecked, with its core tenet of transmitting a culture to successive generations replaced by the idea that what children already knew was of superior value to anything the adult world might foist upon them.

The outcome of this ‘child-centred’ approach has been widespread illiteracy and ignorance and an eroded capacity for independent thought.” Reference

The next Conservative administration must confront the Cultural Left in the same way that Mrs Thatcher confronted the classical Left.

Fifty years ago on this day, French philosopher Albert Camus smashed into a tree and died in that most American of French cars: a Facel Vega HK500.

It was not a pretty crash. Period photos show the car devoured right up to its rear axle—not altogether surprising, given the standards of crash safety half a century ago. Camus was returning home from the holidays in the Vega, owned and driven by his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard, who lost control and killed them both.

The tree which claimed at age 46 one of France’s most unsettling intellectuals was rather sturdier than Camus’s belief in that great fad of French philosophers: communism. Unlike his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus was never an apologist for the crimes of the Soviet Union or a hobnobber with Commie guerrillas: after a youthful flirt with the ideology in the 30s, he was labelled a Trotskyite and expelled from the French Communist Party, whereupon he became an anarchist and a defender of the victims of totalitarian abuse, like the Hungarian revolutionaries crushed by the Soviets in 1956.

Philosophers, shmilosopers, but what about his weird ride? Some say the Facel Vega HK500 was one of the most beautiful cars ever made. These pages have certainly seen praise for this 50s love child of Jean Daninos, a marriage of French coachbuilding and big old Chrysler V8’s—but the end product is closer to Stutz Bearcats and Royales in style than to the contemporary Aston Martins it is often compared to.

Nevertheless, the highly expensive coupé—ten grand in 1958—was a hit in its day, with a who’s who of celebrity owners. Most notable amongst them was Ava Gardner Sir Stirling Moss, who drove one from race to race.

Facel Vega would not prove much more resilient than its most famous dead passenger: the company went bankrupt in 1964, not that uncommon with small luxury manufacturers. But unlike Lamborghini or Aston Martin, Facel Vega never found a financial backer to tide it over.

Before you rush for the bookshelf to give The Stranger one more read, here’s a parting photograph of the Vega’s beautiful rear lights:

Rather like the ones on a 1939 Bugatti Type 57C Voll & Ruhrbeck cabriolet. At least Daninos got that right.

Photo Credit: angel de olavide/Flickr, | El Caganer/Flickr, Wouter Duijndam/Flickr