We don’t think about this when we’re young.
No, when we’re young, we don’t think about these things. You know, you’re prepared to do anything. I remember when I was in North Vietnam during the war, and the bombs were dropping on us every day, I just said once to the Vietnamese, we feel really bad. You know, I’m in my twenties. Can’t we do something to help you? Can we help man the anti-aircraft battery? And the Vietnamese general Pham Van Dong took me aside and he said, I’m really touched you say that, but this is not the Spanish Civil War, where people from abroad can come and fight, and die. This is a war being fought between us and the most technologically advanced nation in the world. Having foreigners coming in to fight with us would require a great deal of effort keeping you people alive, which would be a distraction from the war. So please don’t make this request of us.
Chapter 3
The Soviet Union and Its Satellite States
Oliver Stone: We’ve talked about some of the cataclysmic events after World War II when the West expressed itself aggressively in changing governments. And we mustn’t forget what happened in Greece in 1947. Could you talk about that?
Tariq Ali: Well, the Greek civil war was a very vicious, bloody war involving virtually every single family in Greece. Families were divided, families split up.
Like the Spanish Civil War?
Like the Spanish Civil War. The Greeks still call it “Churchill’s War” because Churchill was so attached to the Greek right and to the Greek royal family that he did not want that country to be changed in any way after the war. The Russians had done the deal at Yalta, deciding that Greece was to be part of the Western sphere of influence. And Stalin was anything if not daft-minded when sticking to his deals. So he told the Greeks you have to behave yourselves. But a group of independent Greeks—they were communists, but more sympathetic to Tito and the Yugoslavs than to Stalin—led by a legendary leader, Aris Velouchiotis, said, we’re going to continue on fighting. So, the war continued. The Russians couldn’t do much about it, but Churchill did. And it was prosecuted with real viciousness and vigor until they defeated the communists.
That war still has echoes today. Recently I was in a part of Greece called Pelion, near Salonika. We were walking through a village, and a Greek friend said there was a big massacre in this village during the civil war, and this is the cemetery for all the communists who died. These events don’t go away, you know. They stay. People remember them. Then something else happens, an eruption totally unrelated to that war, and all these things come up again. A police officer who ordered police to fire on student protesters, his father fought for the right in the civil war. History never goes away, which is why, when I’m speaking especially to younger people, I always say to them that history is present. You may not know it, but almost everything that happens is related to something in the past. You can’t understand the present otherwise.
In Greece didn’t Churchill nakedly hand over British military power to the Americans, saying you finish the job?
Exactly. Though to be technically accurate, the handover was conducted by his Labour Party successor, Clement Attlee, who was under left-wing pressure on this issue from his own party and was relieved to hand over the baby and the filthy bathwater to Truman. The same thing happened in Greece as happened in Saudi Arabia, as happened in other parts of the world where decaying empires handed over their functions to the United States. The United States took over the Greek civil war, and they regard that as a victory. They won that civil war. And many of the officers who carried out the coup d’état in Greece in 1967, imposing a military dictatorship, had fought in the civil war on the side of the West and had been friends ever since.
We’ve been talking about the Western reaction to World War II, and America’s expansion as an empire afterward, displacing the British. Can we talk about the Soviet expansion of that era? Did Soviet aggressiveness provoke a Western response?
The Soviet leadership, Stalin and his successors, were tough on their own populations, but, by and large, they were very careful not to provoke the West. They kept to the deals they had made, both during and after the war. Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt had agreed at Yalta that Eastern Europe, with the countries named on a piece of paper, would be a part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and the Russians then took that seriously. Whether this piece of paper should have been signed at all is another question, but it was. Then the Russians said, Eastern Europe is ours, we were attacked by the Germans through Poland, through Czechoslovakia, so we’re going to control these countries now. That’s been agreed to. And then they did something really foolish and shortsighted. The United States made big strategic mistakes, and so did the Russians. To impose the Soviet system on countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria was unnecessary and wrong. In Czechoslovakia, there actually was an election held in 1948, and the Czech Communist Party emerged as a very large political force in its own right, with the Social Democrats only marginally stronger. Now it should have been perfectly possible to maintain Soviet influence within a social democratic and communist coalition in Czechoslovakia. I think the Czech Social Democrats would have agreed to such an arrangement, but this wasn’t the way Stalin operated. Instead, you had to have a one-party state with the central committee, with a politburo, with a general secretary. That model was imposed on Eastern Europe. It was imposed on East Germany, where you also had a strong social-democratic party, which could have continued. Forcible mergers took place. So, sooner or later, people in these countries said, we don’t like this whole style of government, and you had rebellions. The first in East Berlin, the worker’s uprising in East Berlin, soon after Stalin’s death, crushed by Soviet tanks. Then you had the uprising in Hungary in 1956, crushed by Soviet tanks.
The revolt in East Berlin in 1953 was called the worker’s uprising because it was mainly the working class that said we don’t like this system and the way it’s organized. We’d like to be in power, but we’re not in power. And after the East Berlin worker’s uprising was crushed, Bertolt Brecht wrote this wonderful ten-line letter in the form of a poem to the central committee of the East German Communist Party. The poem is called “The Solution.” He said, dear comrades, it seems to me that the problem is the people:
And that question of Brecht’s can be applied to many situations. Both sides of the Cold War imposed governments they liked and deposed governments they didn’t like.
So the East Berlin uprising was crushed. Then the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was crushed. Then came, of course, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, when Czechs were experimenting with what they called “socialism with a human face.” Big debates opened up on Czech television. For the first time you had a television network and a press that was freer than many outlets in the West. I’ll never forget seeing Czech political prisoners on a special television program confronting the prison guards and the officials who had ordered their arrest. Why did you do it? The effect this had on popular consciousness was staggering. In Czech newspapers, you had endless debates. Does socialism have to be a gray one-party state? Don’t we want socialist democracy, where people can say what they want, say what they feel? And these debates were then beginning to be smuggled in underground publications from Czechoslovakia, samizdat, into the Soviet Union itself. When print workers in the Ukraine published some of the Czech manifestos on socialism and democracy, the Russians panicked. They said, this disease must be stopped. It’s like a cancer, it could kill us unless we deal with it, and they intervened. The Soviet entry into Prague in August 1968 was, I think, the death knell of the Soviet Union itself. Many people gave up hope. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet novelist, someone who is regarded as being very right wing, and nationalistic, was asked once, when did you give up hope that the Soviet system could be reformed? And he said on the twenty-first of August, 1968, when Leonid Brezhnev and his central committee decided to invade Czechoslovakia. For me, that was the end. And he was right. And it was the end not only for Solzhenitsyn, but for the whole system. The Soviet bureaucracy didn’t realize it then, because they never think ahead, but what they did meant that the system was bound to implode sooner or later.