Samizdata

In between getting depressed about the way things are going back in London, it is worth thinking about things that have improved in the last couple of decades. This city, with its beautiful Art Nouveau architecture (much of it designed by Mikhail Eisenstein, father of Sergei) was part of the Soviet Union a mere 20 years ago, with all the bleakness and tyranny that this implied. Today, it is modern and that is in the past, although still occasionally visible in the distance.

I can fly here from London for not much more than £50 return. Rather more importantly, Latvians are free to fly to London for not much more than £50 ($100 US) return, and free to live and work in the UK, and many other places.

The beer here is excellent, and the coffee not quite so excellent (a northern European thing in both cases, I think). One can sit outdoors in beer garden in the evening, listening to live music, drinking beer, and watching a TV news channel that the proprietors of the bar have provided for patrons. It is like being in many other places, other than that the languages and channels are different. Even in Germany one often seems to find oneself watching Sky News or CNN in English. Not so much here.

Here, despite the similarity of the stories, there is still some sense that there is a bear in the room. On the other hand, watching a Chelsea game with commentary in Russian seems perfectly right, somehow, so I suppose the invasion has gone both ways.

(Click for larger versions of the above photographs).

Correction: When I first posted this I wrote “Art Deco” when I meant “Art Nouveau”. Also I misspelled Mikhail Eisenstein’s name. Apologies. Must get more sleep.

Evidence that East German borders guards had a clear ‘license to kill’ anyone who tried to cross the country borders. By the way, I just love how the BBC uses the communist term ‘defectors’. So leaving a totalitarian, communist hell-hole counts as ‘defection’? WTF?

But I digress.

Border guards in East Germany during the Cold War were given clear orders to shoot at attempted defectors, including children, a senior official says.

The seven-page document dated 1 October 1973, was found last week in an archive in the eastern city of Magdeburg, among the papers of an East German border guard.

I am sure it was not the only document in existence. At least there is some tangible evidence now. It reads:

Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm, including when the border breakouts involve women and children, which the traitors have already frequently taken advantage of.

This has not come as a surprise to me. What was a surprise is this has not been officially known, confirmed, understood before. It is as if the societies that went through (and were complicit in) the communist ordeal are reluctant to confront the full horrors, the corruption and destruction that were at their core for decades.

I whole heartedly agree with Marianne Birthler, director of the government office that now manages Stasi archives, when she says.

We have a long way to go in reckoning with the past.

Barely started, I would add.

On a related note this is my reaction to the movie The Lives of Others when I saw it not too long ago.

In Poland a court has ruled that the governments attempts at de-communisation are unconstitutional.

The law required some 700,000 people, including school directors and board members of public companies, to submit statements declaring any contact they had had with the communist secret services.

The court rejected key aspects of the law including the requirement for journalists to submit declarations. […] “A state based on the rule of law should not fulfill a craving for revenge instead of fulfilling justice,” he said. “Screening must not be used for meting out punishment.”

But surely justice cannot be served by allowing the communist era and above all, the role of the people who made it all possible, to vanish down the memory hole. If people did despicable things during the communist era, why should they escape punishment? I cannot imagine a German court being allowed to stop the process of de-nazification in German, so why tolerate something similar in Poland in the aftermath of communism?

Forgiveness can not come before repentance and a lot of people have yet to repent. I wonder if there are any senior judges who might have an embarrassing file on their communist era activities that they would rather not see the light of day? Just wondering.

I am writing this in an airport bar in Prague, where I am having a beer before flying back to London after a weekend away. I will probably write most of the post on the flight home, but it probably will not get posted until I am back in London tomorrow( and this is indeed what has happened. MJ )

This is my second trip to Prague. I was first here in 1992. That trip also involved (amongst other places) Warsaw and Budapest. I had not been back to any of these places again until this year, when I have been back to both Warsaw and Prague. Both Poland and the Czech Republic are much easier places to visit than in 1992 in the sense that I do not need a visa to visit either country, there are lots of ATMs from which I can obtain money, there is less bureaucracy, there are western branded shops on the high street, there are Starbucks clones (although not yet Starbucks itself). In 1992 there were none of these things and travel was harder (I was also in my early 20s and a much less experienced traveller, so my perception may be distorted). However, although Poland and the Czech Republic are now both members of the European Union, the cities both lack the shining new Metro systems, motorways of poorer countries (Spain and Portugal, particularly) that have been dipping in the cohesion fund for longer. Infrastructure works in both places, but it is more spartan.

In 1992, Warsaw felt rather bleak and Prague felt to be a glorious gothic fairytale of a city that had been left behind by the world but which was perhaps catching up. (Budapest was the first city I had been to with a strong Ottoman character about it, and the dominance of the buildings on the high hills overlooking the Danube from the Buda side was and no doubt still is very striking). This year I rather liked Warsaw – it has the feel of a place where business is being done. Prague is still a glorious gothic fairytale of a city, there is lots of good music to listen to, the beer is very good and very inexpensive. The food options are much more diverse than they were 14 years ago. Since the invention of the euro gutted the Dutch money changing industry, the strip between the Charles Bridge and the Old Square in Prague seems to have taken over from that between Centraal Station and Dam Square in Amsterdam as the leading venue in Europe for dodgy money changers and slightly dubious pizza restaurants (the ‘Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments’ seems very old Amsterdam, too).

However, Prague seems to now be perhaps a little too obvious a destination for the more trendy sorts of tourist. People who are seen at the Netherlands Architecture Institute or the Oslo School of Design, and drink in bars with lots of black and chrome and 45 different kinds of vodka (and wear a fair amount of black, but probably only about the right amount to be in keeping with the chrome) tend not to be seen here. It seems more now to be a destination for Anglophone backpackers and American students from universities outside the Ivy League. It is a backpacker destination. It has not moved as far up the tourism food chain that I had hoped it might.

And, alas, I feel I am being a little unkind. I have, in truth had a bad experience today, which has to do with the way in which the tourist ecosystem in Prague has evolved to take advantage of the people who have visited.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I travel a lot. (I will eventually explain what I did in Denmark last weekend. Honest). I generally know what I am doing in a foreign city. I like to believe I am fairly defensive and steet smart, and as I am also a relatively large and scruffy male who at least thinks he does not look prosperous, I have seldom had anyone try to rob me, or otherwise hassle me.

In fact, the only time anyone previously tried to rob me was in Prague in 1992. I started the trip by myself, but by the time I was leaving Prague I found myself in the company of a girl from Brisbane in her early twenties and a slightly mad television journalist from Los Angeles. The three of us went to a railway station in the evening in order to catch the overnight train to Budapest. As we were about to get into the train, a group of loudly talking people crowded around and towards us. My wallet was foolishly in my back trousers pocket, but I was smart enough to respond by immediately putting my hand on it. I discovered that there was another hand on it, trying to pick my pocket. Once the thief realised I was on to him, he rapidly withdrew, but his friends did not. I should have yelled thief at that point, but I am shy and unassertive, so I did not. I few seconds later, I did hear a yell, as the American TV journalist realised that his bag had been unzipped and a hand was in it. He yelled loudly, and the thieves withdrew. Although they tried to rob us, looking back I am struck by what amateurs the pickpockets were in 1992. We were pretty naive too, but still they failed to rob us.

Since then, I have always put my valuables in my front pockets, and I do continue to look a little scruffy, which I have believed meant I was perhaps not an obvious target. Alas, though, this afternoon the thieves figured me out and robbed me anyway. This time they were good at it. → Continue reading: Of Prague and pickpockets

Now that the protests are no longer anticipating the overthrow of the Lukashnko government in a display of ‘people power’, the mainstream media moves elsewhere. The narrative of the post-Soviet dictator in Belarus is an uncomfortable fit with the comforting delusions of the West. The latest project to promote civil society is the radio station funded by the EU, the USA and the Czech Republic, broadcasting out of Warsaw. It has a mixture of healthy cultural programming and news, broadcast over a number of media: AM, FM and the internet. However the name, European Radio for Belarus, can only have been dreamt up by the Commission. One suspects that any popularity will be achieved despite its title, not because of it. Its more ferocious counterparts, Radio Svoboda/Radio Free Europe, campaign more directly for democracy.

European Radio for Belarus, is despite its name, not a foreign station broadcasting into Belarus. Rather, it is a Belarusian station just temporarily coordinating its operations in Warsaw. There is also an office in Minsk and correspondents all over Belarus. Operating since February 2006, European Radio for Belarus is funded by the United States and Czech governments, and the European Commission.

We have been asked frequently by other journalists, that are you like Radio Svoboda, Radio Free Europe which said that when democracy comes, it closes the next day. And we say that it is not our goal. We are doing vice versa, we hope that when changes come, we can return there and work as a professional, attractive radio station with balanced information and education content which would be really recognisable by people in Belarus. I think this is the main difference of our project and other pro-democracy projects around Belarus.

Just to remember that this is another day in Belarus: Anatoly Lebedko, opposition leader of the Belarussian United Civil Party was detained whilst attending an unofficial protest on the seventh anniversary of former Interior Minister Yury Zakharenko’s disappearance; and graffiti artist Artur Finkevich was imprisoned for two years hard labour, after writing “We want a change”.

Lukashenko is the enemy of change, improvement and progress: all of these trends will end his reign, or force him to fundamentally adapt to new ways. Now that there are more windows on the world, the yearning for change amongst those who can only spectate becomes ever more desperate.