The Dark Hero’s last laugh

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

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