In Europe

than a million members. With the support of the communists, President Edvard Benežs and Jan Masaryk sought contact with both the Soviet Union and the West, and showed great interest in the Marshall Plan.
    Yet no matter how firm their local and national roots were, all these communist parties were ultimately forced to submit to abrupt takeovers steered and manipulated by the Kremlin, dictatorial interventions by elite groups within the party who, once they had achieved position, refused to let go again. In the long run, the communists usually set up a general popular front in which all parties were forced to take part, as well as a broad gamut of associations and organisations, up to and including the Federation of Invalids. All dissidents were silenced by brute force. During the last free elections in August 1947, the communists in Hungary received less than twenty-five per cent of the vote; after May 1949, however, László Rajk could triumphantly announce that his Workers’ Party enjoyed the support of ninety-five per cent of the population. In December 1949, the Bulgarian Fatherland Front won ninety-eight per cent of the vote, a percentage that seemed rather suspect, even to its most fervent supporters.
    In 1950, Hans Krijt – ‘The communist youth organisation had suddenly realised that I was a Dutch political refugee’ – ended up at the Prague Film Academy. ‘I was in the same class as Milós Forman, who wanted to be a screenwriter at that time. Milan Kundera was studying dramaticsthere. Forman was a real big mouth: he was the only one who would blurt out that the newest Russian film was completely worthless. Kundera was still a communist then, he wrote for official party organs. But we all made fun of Stalin. In Marxism class we used a linguistics textbook written by Stalin, he even stuck his nose into things like that. We made jokes about it, but everyone played along with the game, teachers and students. The lessons followed that textbook faithfully.’
    ‘Kundera was typical of that generation of intellectuals,’ Krijt's wife Olga Krijtova says. ‘Right after the war they were all communists: the Soviets were, after all, our liberators. But from 1956 they began feeling more and more uneasy. Kundera started writing satires:
Ridiculous Loves
in 1963 and
The Joke
in 1967; when you read his work you could see the Prague Spring on its way. Until 1968 came and rolled right over it. Finally he went into exile.’
    Olga Kritjova became a Dutch-Czech translator. She remained a member of the Communist Party until 1968. When she quit the party, she was immediately forbidden to translate or to write. ‘That was a problem you solved by using a “front”, someone who let you use his or her name. That did create problems, though, when a “fronted” translation won a prize. Then the person whose name you'd borrowed had to accept the prize, give readings, that sort of thing.’
    In 1969 the couple tried to emigrate to the Netherlands, but their application was rejected. After that Krijt taught Dutch at a language institute. After he once explained the difference between ‘I believe he's coming’ and ‘I believe in God’, he immediately received a reprimand for spreading religious propaganda.
    Olga: ‘Every time a reception was held at the Dutch embassy, I had to report on it right away. What I always filled in was “Talked about the weather in Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands.” The officials never put up a fuss, they had their own forms to complete anyway.’
    Hans: ‘My Dutch class was always packed with girls trying to escape the country by marrying a Dutchman.’
    Olga: ‘Those were deadly years!’
    For Central and Eastern Europe, the deadly years lasted from 1948, by way of 1956 and 1968, until 1989.
    Churchill had declared the Cold War in 1946, but the first skirmishes did not begin until a year later. In 1947 the American president decided to support the Greeks in their struggle against ‘communist’ rebels. In that year, too, the Marshall Plan was announced – intended in part to turn the rising tide of communism in Western Europe. In the communist world, too, the first internal conflict took place. Tito had no intention of conforming to Stalin's directives, and made no attempt to hide the fact. So in spring 1948 a public rift arose between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the first crack in the façade of the Eastern Bloc. Czechoslovakia began making overtures for aid from the Marshall