Excerpt from the preface to ‘The Politburo has Decided That You are Unwell’ (2004)

In 1990 I went to Prague to cover the first post-revolutionary Czech elections for The Irish Times. There, I met a man about my own age, name Ivan, who lived in a beautiful small apartment just around the corner from Narodni Street, where the November 1989 revolution had started when a students’ march in memory of a dead hero was attacked by the police.

How many people now remember the reports that emerged in the wake of that revolution to the effect that this incident had actually been engineered from Moscow by the KGB, on Mikhail Gorbachev’s direct command? It appears that there were fears in the Kremlin that the communist regime in Prague had become so hardline that the inevitable full-blooded revolution would result in the removal of communism and the termination of the link with the USSR. Gorbachev’s plan was to infiltrate the Czech student movement so as to bring about a controlled rebellion which would allow the existing regime in Prague to be replaced by a more moderate, reformist administration of the Kremlin’s choosing — still socialist, but socialism with a human face.

The scheme was, if anything, too successful. The student demonstration was put down by the police and the word went out that a student had been killed. Within days, the revolution was unstoppable. In fact, the ‘student’ had been a member of the KGB, who had infiltrated the student group, and who lay down and pretended to be dead so as to provoke precisely the situation that resulted. But the plan began to backfire when none of the people Gorbachev wished to put in place were willing to serve, and the result was the removal of the communist regime and its replacement by a fully democratic administration under Vaclav Havel.

But, in the arcade of a shop on Narodni Street, at the point where the bogus student had fallen, an impromptu altar was created. In accordance with tradition, people came to pay tribute at the altar and to light candles in memory of the fallen hero. Soon, hundreds, perhaps thousands of candles were burning there around the clock. Soon, too, the candle wax became something of a social  menace, pouring onto the street and blocking up drains. My friend Ivan succeeded to clean up the altar every day and remove the excess candle wax from the sidewalk.

Then Ivan had an idea. He bought himself a number of bronze busts of the communist leaders of Czechoslovakia and the USSR, still readily available in only-just post-communist Prague. From these he made molds, into which he poured the candle wax, making new candles in the shape of the heads of Lenin, Stalin, and the erstwhile Czech tyrant Klement Gottwald. He called his products ‘Gottwalds’ and began selling them to the many curious visitors attracted to Prague at the time.

When I was leaving Prague after the election to return to Dublin, Ivan accompanied me to the airport. On the way out in the taxi, I couldn’t help noticing that he was carrying a somewhat conspicuous cardboard box, which he refused to discuss in any serious way. When we reached the airport, he handed me the box, saying: “You must bring to Ireland the heads of the socialist murderers.”

It was at this moment that any illusion about socialism melted away from me forever. For what struck me immediately was the banality of my own clinging to an ideology which, for Ivan and his countrymen and women, was an ideology of death. Literal death certainly, but also other kinds of death, rendering Czechoslovakia “a Biafra of the spirit” in Havel’s powerful phrase. (pp.6-8)