These thoughts, however, seemed out of place in a post-war world in which the new global institutions were the UN, the IMF and the World Bank, and in which the European colonial empires had a very limited future. Indeed, we have still not achieved a full and successful transition from a stable colonial to a stable post-colonial world. As crises like Somalia demonstrate, there are parts of Africa and Asia where order cannot be provided locally, but for which the international institutions have no remedy — certainly no remedy as effective as colonial rule was a century ago.
But the greatest transformation affecting Britain at the time — and the one which would have a great impact on my political life — was the change of the Soviet Union from comrade in arms to deadly enemy. It is important to stress how little understanding most people in the West had at this time of conditions within the USSR. True, many of the facts were available if anyone had cared to investigate and report them. But by and large and for a variety of reasons they did not. As I have described, I was never tempted to sympathize with communism. But my opposition to it was at this time more visceral than intellectual. It was much later that I thought and read more deeply about the communist system and saw precisely where its weaknesses and wickednesses lay. And it is interesting to note that when Hayek came to write a new preface to The Road to Serfdom in 1976 he too felt that he had ‘under-stressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russia’.
So too, by and large, did the newspapers. For example, the Daily Telegraph gave little prominence to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, and even after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in August 1939 oddly interpreted the Russian invasion of eastern Poland as a sign of ‘tension’ with Hitler. In wartime, Anglo-Soviet friendship societies bloomed. Smiling, soft-hearted Uncle Joe, the creation as much of Western wishful thinking as of Soviet propaganda, concealed the reality of the paranoid tyrant. Douglas Hyde’s I Believed (which appeared in 1950, and which I read) reveals the extent to which British communists infiltrated, manipulated and distorted so as subtly to shape political debate. Hyde’s account shows too how the war of disinformation in Britain was as ruthlessly and directly controlled from Moscow as were the communist movements which worked in Eastern Europe alongside the advancing Red Army to impose Stalin’s grip on countries whose liberties we had fought the war against Hitler to defend.
A strong case can be made to mitigate Churchill’s and Britain’s role in the abandonment of Central and Eastern Europe. The famous half sheet of paper on which Churchill scribbled his proposals for shared spheres of influence in the Balkans when he met Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 does indeed have a whiff of cynical realpolitik about it, as Churchill himself accepted when he described it as a ‘naughty document’. It clearly flies in the face of the proclaimed principles of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. But it recognized the reality that the Red Army had occupied a large part of Eastern Europe — and it may have helped to preserve Greek independence. Churchill at least saw, as the Americans did not, that the precipitate withdrawal of our troops in the face of the Red Army would leave the central zone of Germany in Soviet hands and effectively remove any chance at all of our being able to influence the fate of Eastern Europe.
That said, there is a difference between recognizing reality and legitimizing it. For legitimacy tends to set injustice in concrete. So the Conservatives who abstained or voted against the Government on the issue of the Yalta Agreement of February 1945 — among them Alec Douglas-Home — were right. My own unease was transformed into opposition on hearing a powerful speech by Lord De L’Isle and Dudley to OUCA in the Taylorian. It would certainly have been difficult, and perhaps impossible, to force the Soviets to respect democracy and the right of national self-determination in the countries which they now occupied. It was understandable that weary and wounded American and British forces wanted to put the horrors of war behind them and not to risk some new conflict with their former ally. But to set a seal of approval on agreements which we knew in our hearts would not be honoured — let alone to try to force the exiled non-communist government of Poland to accept them — was wrong.
Yalta made me begin to think hard about the military aspect of the communist threat. Little by little, I was also piecing together in my own mind other features of the reality of communism. For example, I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon with its poignant account of a communist show trial. Unlike Valtin’s description of Gestapo brutality, Koestler’s book allowed me for the first time to get inside, as it were, the mentality of the communist. Even more subtly, it showed that through the eyes of the communist himself the communist system makes no sense. Koestler’s character, Rubashov, reflects:
The Party denied the free will of the individual — and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives — and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good and evil — and at the same time it spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced — and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.
Years later, when as Leader of the Opposition I met Koestler, I said how powerful I had found his book. I asked him how he had been able to imagine Rubashov and his tormentors. He told me no imagination was required. They were real.
As with the whole question of the atomic bomb, so with the (alleged) theoretical basis of Marxism: the fact that I was a scientist gave me a somewhat different insight into some of the arguments. It was in fact after I left university that I read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper, whose analysis in many ways complemented that of Hayek, approached Marxism from the point of view of the philosopher of the natural sciences. This meant that he was ideally equipped to expose the fraudulent claim of Marxists to have discovered immutable laws of history, social development or ‘progress’ — laws which were comparable to the laws of natural science. It was not just that the ‘inevitable’ course of events which Marx had prophesied had not occurred and showed no signs of occurring. Marx and Marxists had not even understood the scientific method, let alone practised it in their analysis. Unlike the Marxists — whether historians, economists or social scientists — who tried to ‘prove’ their theories by accumulating more and more facts to sustain them, ‘the method of science is rather to look out for facts which may refute the theory… and the fact that all tests of the theory are attempted falsifications of predictions derived with its help furnishes the clue to scientific method’. The political consequences of this basic error — perhaps more properly described as basic fraud — were summed up by Popper in the dedication of his later book The Poverty of Historicism: ‘In memory of the countless men, women and children of all creeds or nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.’
With such a background of reading, it is therefore easy to imagine how I reacted to Churchill’s speech of 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri. It is, of course, rightly famous for its powerful warning that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’, and that in these Russian-dominated states ‘police governments’ were prevailing. But no less significant in my eyes was Churchill’s evocation of the special relationship between Britain and the United States, and of the idealistic ‘message of the British and American peoples to mankind’ which lay behind it. The ideas of liberty found their fullest development in the political traditions and institutions of our two countries. The speech is now rightly seen as extraordinarily prescient. But at the time it was bitterly criticized as warmongering hyperbole by commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. It would not be long, however, before their tone started to change, as Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe and Greece became unmistakably clear.