We stood on the bridge at midnight with glasses of vodka in our hands. As the
clock in the Queens’ College cloisters struck 12, we raised our glasses and
toasted “to the revolution”. Then began a rowdy and energetic rendition of
the Internationale, booming out at first over the waters of the River Cam
but feebly petering out when it came to the second verse which – like the
national anthem – none of us was quite sure how to continue.
After we had climbed down from the parapet of the Silver Street bridge, we 12
or 13 Cambridge undergraduates – all men, I am fairly sure – gathered again
in some nearby college rooms where we earnestly agreed that our first
revolutionary commitment from that moment would be to learn all the words of
the Internationale so we would not disgrace ourselves in the company of
other comrades when we went on demonstrations. None of us, I believe, ever
bent our brows to that stern task. That would tally with the general
approach that most of us took towards our studies.
It was October 25, 1967, the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. I
don’t know what became of all those boys but I am still friends with a few
and have followed the careers of others, such as Simon Hoggart, The
Guardian’s parliamentary sketch writer and radio presenter.
A couple, including Peter Cole (once News Review editor at this paper) have
become eminent professors. Gwynn Pritchard – our firebrand leader in black
leather bomber jacket and black beret just like Che Guevara – joined the BBC
and rose to become head of Welsh broadcasting. One has been a professional
gardener all his working life. Another has been a semi-profes-sional
drop-out for nearly 30 years.
I may not be sure what ultimately became of everybody else, but I do know what
we did immediately after that night. Within days, some of us would be
pushing and pulling with the bogeys in Grosvenor Square at the first big
demonstration of the Viet-nam Solidarity Campaign (for the massive
demonstration in March 1968, every one of us would be there).
On October 28 we joined a large pack of student demonstrators who violently
attacked the car of Harold Wilson, the prime minister, after he had made a
speech at the Guildhall. Within weeks many would be hectically campaigning
for change in their colleges, their faculties and the university, resulting
in the first serious conflict of the 20th century between Cambridge
University’s governing bodies and its students.
Within years one or two of these young men would be living in revolutionary
communes far away from the bourgeois family existence from which almost all
of us had sprung. One, at least, went further and if perhaps he had
swallowed one more tab of LSD or had been one inch more trusted by the
anarchist Stuart Chris-tie, the Stoke Newington Eight – who were tried at
the Old Bailey in 1972 with bombing offences committed by the Angry Brigade
– might have become the Stoke Newington Nine.
The day after that singing on the bridge, some of us hung red flags and
banners bearing the hammer and sickle from the windows of our rooms. On the
outside of my door I pinned up a poster of Lenin, emblazoned with the words
he spoke to the Second All-Russia Congress on October 26, 1917, the day
after the revolution: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist
order.” Not long after, when I opened my door in the morning, I found the
poster in shreds on the floor and a bucketful of horse manure dumped on my
threshold.
Fully deserved, I now think. If I had been walking along Silver Street last
week and had seen some young student twits toasting the 90th anniversary of
the Bolshevik revolution, I should have been tempted to push them off the
bridge into the river. So far as I am concerned today, they – and we, 40
years ago – might just as well have been marking the anniversary of the
Nazis’ Kristallnacht and bellowing out the chorus of their Horst Wessel
marching song.
What were we thinking of? The Prague spring had not yet been crushed by Soviet
tanks, but even so we all knew about the Soviet purges, the show trials, the
executions, the extermination of the kulaks, the murderously suppressed
revolts in Poland and Hungary. Solzhenitsyn had already published One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Orwell’s
Animal Farm were older than we were.
I – for pity’s sake – had distant but beloved family in Czechoslovakia whom I
had visited in my mid-teens. I am one of the few westerners still alive who
actually saw the giant statue of Stalin – the largest statue in Europe –
that overlooked Prague for many years. I had sensed the presence of the
secret police in shadows and of informers among the neighbours. I had felt
the fear of my kin.
Much that I did in my youth can now make me shout aloud with shame; but not
much is more mortifying than to think I once toasted mass murderers,
torturers and totalitarian despots. How to explain it?
The kindest interpretation (undeserved) is that we were making a local rather
than an international statement. We were not demonstrating a loving
attachment to the Soviet Union so much as a passionate detachment from our
immediate society. It was not that we shared a longing to join the bread
queues in Moscow so much as to declare our determination not to join the
society of Cambridge, of Britain or of the West as we then found it.
We knew where we did not belong – in the Cambridge of the all-male colleges
and rich boys’ drinking societies such as the Pitt club, nor in the England
of hunt balls and Pall Mall clubs; but it was not so easy to identify a
code, a party or a society (apart from the company of each other) to which
we might belong.
We knew we detested the America of Richard Nixon and the B52s that were carpet
bombing peasant villages in southeast Asia; but no form or focus of
organised opposition was obvious except to turn to the big beards of the
19th century, to Marx and Engels, and to the most successful revolutionaries
of the 20th century, Lenin and Trotsky.
So much for generous excuses. They might be allowed in small measure towards
confused young squirts who were barely out of school; but they can hardly be
extended towards adults who have unapologetically carried the attachments of
those times into their working lives and have achieved prominence and power
in our own society.
Bolshevism and the Russian revolution may have disintegrated in ruins but the
generation that raised its toast in the direction of the Kremlin 40 years
ago has triumphed. Leninism has been defeated almost everywhere in the
world, but the postwar generation of baby boomers who went so far left in
the 1960s now control this country’s leading institutions. Their taste for
totalitarian simplicities and weakness for millenarian terrors has been
digested into modern feminism, environmentalism and global warming. Many
remain absolutely unrepentant about their past because they have been so
successful in the present (one of the sweeter fruits of victory is never
having to apologise).
While Günther Grass, the German author, is excoriated for having joined the
Waffen SS at 17, Alan Johnson, the health secretary, is benignly patted on
the back for admitting that he was once ideologically aligned to the
Communist party of Great Britain. While the Daily Mail is routinely vilified
for its prewar support for the Nazis, The Guardian’s role in cheer-leading
for a succession of Marxist tyrants from Mao and Pol Pot to Cas-tro and
Mugabe is rarely questioned.
Joschka Fischer – former German foreign minister and vice-chancellor – may
have apologised for his actions when he was a member of the “proletarian
union for terror and destruction” in Germany, but his friend Daniel
Cohn-Bendit – co-president of the Green group in the European parliament –
has been less forthcoming about his links with Hans-Joachim Klein, the
Baader-Meinhof terrorist.
The feminist journalist and author Beatrix Campbell, who is visiting professor
of women’s studies at New-castle University, is honoured with doctorates
at British universities but is never called to account for the fact that as
a young subeditor on the communist Morning Star newspaper she took
state-subsidised holidays in the odious Erich Honecker’s East Germany and
lovingly spoke of that nightmare land as “the GDR” (German Democratic
Republic – a formulation in which only the word German was not a foul
parody).
For every one of those randomly chosen names 10m more members of the same
generation in Europe and America share an equal shame. We were all deluded.
We were all mistaken. We were all – to varying degrees – off or out of our
heads. We owe the world an apology and some acts of contrition. The 90th
anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution might be a good moment to make a
start.
