That is why we so strongly support all those European and American spokesmen, who have insisted that no serious advance towards a stable peace can be made unless some progress at least is seen in the free movement of people and of ideas.
The reaction to this speech confirmed that I was the odd woman out. The Helsinki Agreement was widely welcomed. I could imagine the shaking of wise heads at my impulsive imprudence. Reggie Maudling came round at once to see me in Flood Street to express both his anger at my delivering such a speech without consulting him and his disagreement with its content. I gave no ground. Indeed, Mr Brezhnev’s evident satisfaction at what Helsinki achieved helped convince me that I must return to the subject: he described it as ‘a necessary summing up of the political outcome of the Second World War’. In other words he regarded it — not least perhaps the commitment not to alter European borders except ‘by peaceful means and by agreement’ — as recognizing and legitimizing the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe which they had obtained by force and fraud at the end of the war.
The Helsinki Summit of 1975 is now viewed in a favourable light because the dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe used its provisions as a programme for which to fight in their long struggle with the communist State. And indeed by making human rights a matter of treaty obligations rather than domestic law it gave the dissidents leverage which they employed to the full. Their bravery would have been of little account, however, without the subsequent Western, particularly American, renewal of resolve and defence build-up. These halted the expansion that had given Soviet communism the psychological prestige of historical inevitability, exerted an external pressure on communist regimes that diverted them from domestic repression, and gave heart to the burgeoning resistance movements against communism. This pincer movement — the revived West and the dissidents — more than countered the advantages that the Soviets received from Helsinki in the form of increased legitimacy and Western recognition. Without that, Helsinki would have been just one more step on the road to defeat.
Not surprisingly after the Helsinki speech, I was not invited to the Soviet Union, as perhaps a different Leader of the Opposition would have been. But I felt it important to deepen my knowledge of the communist system in practice. Consequently, when an invitation arrived for me to visit Romania I accepted. I already had some knowledge of that country, gained when I was Education Secretary. Improbable as it may seem, there had grown up a regular Anglo-Romanian seminar on education, held one year in Bucharest and one year in Cambridge. My Romanian opposite number, Mircea Malita, was a distinguished mathematician. Like other ‘cultural’ events under communism, these seminars had a largely political and diplomatic purpose. That said, there was no doubt in my mind about the cultural riches of Romania itself — not only Bucharest, known as ‘the Paris of the Balkans’ (still at that time spared from the later devastation inflicted on it by Ceausescu’s megalomaniac building plans of the 1980s), but also the luminous painted monastery churches of Bukovina, which I visited in September 1971. Not surprisingly, the Romanians were anxious to continue to cultivate me when I became Leader of the Opposition, and for the moment this accorded with my purposes as well.
At the time of my second visit at the beginning of September 1975, Romania occupied a unique position in the communist world. Following in the footsteps of his (already disgraced) predecessor Gheorghe Dej, Nicolae Ceausescu had plotted out an independent path for Romania within the Warsaw Pact. In 1968, for example, he had visited Prague and, apparently sincerely, expressed support for the Polish reform movement and bitterly condemned the Russian suppression of it. The Western view, which I then shared, was that Romania should be accorded discreet support in the hope that its example might lead to further fragmentation in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In fact, Ceausescu was playing a ruthless game in which ethnic tensions (with Hungary), East-West competition (between NATO and the Warsaw Pact) and rivalry within the communist world (between the Soviet Union and China) were exploited as seemed appropriate at any juncture.
Between the conversations I had with Ceausescu in 1971 and 1975 he had further consolidated his position. Although he had become effective leader in 1965, it was not until 1974 that he united the functions of Party Leader and Head of State and Government. From now on he was freer to indulge his political fantasies. For what we Westerners did not sufficiently grasp was that Ceausescu was a throwback both to Stalinism, whose methods he employed, and indeed to a more traditional Balkan despotism for which the promotion of his family and the flaunting of wealth and power were essential trappings. Ceausescu himself never struck me as anything out of the ordinary, just cold, rather dull, spewing forth streams of statistics and possessing that stilted formal courtesy that communists adopted as a substitute for genuine civilization. We discussed the Soviet threat and he gave me a long account, faithfully mirrored later by guides, diplomats and factory managers, of the astonishing successes of the Romanian economy. He was particularly proud of the level of ‘investment’ which, as a share of the national income, certainly dwarfed that of Western countries. In fact, of course, misdirected investment is a classic feature of the planned economy; it was just that Romania, whose people apart from the ruling élite lived in poverty, misdirected more than the others.
I was also shown around a scientific institute specializing in polymer research. My guide was none other than Elena Ceausescu, who had already begun to indulge a personal fantasy world which matched her husband’s in absurdity, if not in human consequences: she was determined to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on polymers. It subsequently emerged that she could barely have distinguished a polymer from a polygon. But behind the defences of translation and communist long-windedness she put up quite a good show.
In other ways, however, Romania did illustrate more characteristic features of the communist system. I visited a factory and heard from those in charge — I presumed they were the management — a litany of the company’s achievements. ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said, ‘but could I speak to the trade union leaders here? Perhaps they may have something to add?’ A look of astonishment spread across their faces. ‘But that’s us!’ they replied. What the individual workers at the factory — or indeed the neighbours across whose houses it was belching thick brown smoke — might have commented is another matter. For, as in the fully developed socialist state, the trade unions of Romania were political not industrial institutions.
A little later I had dinner with Members of the Romanian ‘Parliament’. It was explained to me that one had to be a member of an approved, i.e. reliably communist, trade union in order to stand in a parliamentary election. They showed me the list of some thirty-five such bodies. Looking down it, the ‘beekeepers’ union’ caught my eye. The opportunity was irresistible. In grave fashion I began to interrogate them. How large was the beekeepers’ bloc in Parliament? Who were its leaders? What were the factions? Was there an anti-beekeepers’ faction? The evening slipped by more quickly.
A final practical lesson for me, which any Western politician or businessman visiting the Eastern bloc was well advised to learn as soon as possible, was to assume that someone was always listening. This was an inconvenience for people like me in the country for just a few days. But for the subjects of a communist state it was a kind of intellectual terror. Depriving human beings of their privacy has the intended psychological effect of making them withdrawn, introverted and incapable of the communication based on mutual trust which permits civil society. Thus communism applied sophisticated techniques in the service of a primitive ideology so as to destroy not just potential centres of opposition but rather the final enemy, human personality.