For ten years before 1989 I was in the habit of visiting Eastern Europe to support the fragile underground educational networks there. I would meet my contacts on street corners at prearranged times, to be taken by tram to some smoke-filled room in an outlying apartment, where a group of whispering “students” had gathered to meet me.

Every knock on the door was followed by a frozen silence and, from time to time, someone would lift a corner of the curtain and peer anxiously into the street. Books in many languages lined the walls and as often as not, a crucifix would be fastened to the wall above the shelves.

The people I met were of many different casts of mind. Some, among the older generation, still maintained a belief in the “socialism with a human face” that had been announced by Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak President, during the Prague Spring of 1968. Most of the younger people did not believe that socialism could wear a human face or that, if it tried to do so, it would look any better than one of those monsters with a human face painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

For the most part, the people I met were quiet, studious, often deeply religious, attempting to build shrines in the catacombs, around which small circles of marginalised people could gather to venerate the memory of their national culture. This was especially true of the Czechs, from whom their national culture had been officially confiscated after the Soviet invasion. In Poland and Hungary dissidents could still occupy posts in the official universities, and in Poland — after Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage to his homeland in 1979 — everyone was a dissident in any case. Still, that didn’t alter the fact that there was a heavy price for opposing communism, and only a few were brave enough to pay it.

My small contribution consisted of joining like-minded colleagues to smuggle books and printing materials, to organise lectures and to maintain an underground messaging service. The experience taught me a lot about people, and in particular about the transforming effect of sacrifice on the human character. The people that I met were imbued with a more than ordinary gentleness and concern for one another. It was hard to earn their trust but, once offered, trust was complete.

Moreover, because learning, culture and the European spiritual heritage were, for them, symbols of their own inner freedom, and of the national independence they sought to remember, if not to regain, they looked on those things with an unusual veneration. As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips I was amazed to discover students for whom words devoted to such things were wasted words, and who sat in those little pockets of underground air studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.

In 1985 the secret police moved against me and I was arrested in Brno; visits to Czechoslovakia came to an end and I was followed in Poland and Hungary. But our team kept going until 1989 when, to our surprise, the catacombs were opened and our friends came pale, staggering and bewildered into the sunlight, to be hailed by the people as the natural trustees of their restituted country. This was a wonderful moment and, for a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State.

It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and realpolitik — without which it is impossible to stay in government.

They sat in their offices for a while, pityingly observed by their staff of former secret policemen, while affable and much travelled rivals, of the kind with whom German Social Democrats and French Gaullists could both “do business”, carefully groomed themselves for the next elections.

Not since 1945 had so many records of party membership disappeared, or so many dissident biographies been invented. Within two years the real dissidents had returned to their studies, while the world outside was racing on, led by a new political class that had learnt to add a record of outspoken dissidence to all its other dissimulations. We were witnessing what Dubcek had promised, socialism with a human face.

The most urgent preoccupation of this new political class was to climb on to the European Union gravy train, which promised rewards of a kind that had been enjoyed, in previous years only by the inner circle of the secret police.

The resistance we have seen to the EU in Eastern Europe should be understood in this light. Although incomparably more benign than the Communist Party, European institutions involve imposing top-down government, unaccountable offices and a system of elaborate rewards for co-operation on a people who all associate such things with the Soviet past. The Czechs, in particular, have been troubled to discover that the new political class prefers unanswerable imperial power to the ardours of accountable government.

Only President Klaus, a survivor from those first days of jubilation, has tried to take a stand against the new Moloch, and he, too, has had to back down.

The Poles have been equally shocked by the impact of EU legislation that insists on “non-discrimination” clauses and a battery of agenda-driven “human rights” that conflict with fundamental tenets of the Catholic faith. For the ordinary voter it seems as if the Polish nation, whose claims had been celebrated every Sunday since the Pope’s historic pilgrimage, has no part to play in the new political process. But in Poland, too, the political class is happy to be relieved of the burden of government by institutions that reward good behaviour and require no one to account for the really big decisions.

The EU has facilitated the transition away from communism. It has filled the legal vacuum — indeed, filled it to bursting. It has offered easy routes to cross-border trade and incoming investment. It has led to an exchange of expertise and — in Poland’s case — to a mass escape of the working population.

But those countries today bear no resemblance to the liberated nations that were dreamt of in the catacombs. For when the stones were lifted, and the air of freedom blew across the underground altars, the flame that had been kept alive on them was instantly blown out.

Roger Scruton was an academic at Birkbeck College, London, in the 1980s. His latest book is I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine (Continuum)

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