Hitchens: “This is how Prague cured me of communism”

“It was 1968, a year of wonders, none of them particularly pleasant, which will not easily fade from my memory,” writes Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday. “It was the year I joined a Trotskyist sect (…) Then came Prague and the Soviet tanks crushing a brief blossoming of freedom, around this time of year. Freedom under communism was like fire under water. But what was this mysterious city, Prague? I owe the trip to Evelyn Jones, wife of the once all-powerful trade union leader Jack Jones, and a friend of my wife’s parents. Evelyn had been a courier for the Comintern in the 1930s, carrying messages to Moscow from Western communists and bringing gold back. Whilst planning our train journey (Paris, Heidelberg, Nuremberg), we noticed that the official map stopped at the Iron Curtain: from Nuremberg there was only an arrow pointing to ‘Praha’. So, one day in early spring, our train from sleepy Franconia entered the empire of evil, passing through a web of barbed wire, and if I hadn’t thought of it as an empire of evil before, I certainly did then. The carriage was like a prison. The seats were made of hard plastic. The compartments were decorated with a large red star. The towns we passed through were blackened by smoke, and everywhere we saw red propaganda banners hanging. Our fellow travellers had teeth made of stainless steel. As we entered the outskirts of Prague, we began to see Soviet railway carriages marked with the hammer and sickle, and to feel ourselves being drawn into the orbit of a darker sun. There were no tourists. The staple diet seemed to be dumplings. The atmosphere reeked of oppression. We learnt for the first time what it means to be afraid to speak one’s mind. And from its towers, the city truly whispered the last spells of the 1930s, just as Evelyn Jones had promised. History—the real, dangerous kind that frightens and baffles—burst into my mind—and all this in the midst of one of the most movingly beautiful places I had ever seen. I’m sorry, but you can’t go there anymore. The modern world has stripped it of its past. But we will always have Prague, the greatest history lesson I have ever experienced.”