I find myself seated between Reagan’s National Security Adviser in 1981 and a French ex-spook, and opposite an anti-Sharon Israeli I talked to at lunch and who turns out to have been deputy head of Mossad in pre-Likud days. I also recognise a Czech apparition from a past I would like to forget: Rudolf Slansky junior, expelled from the Party for his part in the Prague Spring, later a Charter 77 protester. He even seems to me to look like his father, executed in 1952, the most prominent Communist victim in the last and most overtly anti-semitic of the show ‘trials’ of Stalin’s Eastern Europe. Somewhere along the table Lech Walesa is explaining that neither Russian policy nor Polish Communists had anything to do with Poland regaining independence: it was all due to Solidarity and the pope. (My neighbour, who had signed the cheques for the CIA’s Polish operations at the time, is unimpressed.) Walesa has the air of a Polish John Prescott, only bigger. He has not carried the last 25 years as well as the other Poles.
Reading this, one wonders whether even Hobsbawm himself really believes the part about the "cheques". The whole essay turns out to be a curious two-handed "tribute" to ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev:
If the historian in me was slightly disappointed, the fan of Mikhail Gorbachev was not. Was he a great man? I do not know. I doubt it. He was – he visibly continues to be – a man of integrity and good will whose actions had enormous consequences, for good and bad. I regard it as a privilege to be the contemporary of this man. Humanity is in his debt. All the same, if I were a Russian I would also think of him as the man who brought ruin to his country.
(Hat tip: Marius)
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