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socialism of the developing-country variety, but it also encouraged those in
more developed countries who were unhappy about what they saw as the
accommodation of socialist parties to the status quo to remain on a more ab–
solute course. Communist parties came into being which have played a hor–
rific and often murderous part in the long-running battles with Social
Democrats, notably in the Spanish Civil War, during the years of the Hitler–
Stalin Pact, and in some European countries during the immediate postwar
period as well. When the Soviets forced the countries of your region under
their rule by forming "popular fronts," "unity parties," or merely Communist–
dominated "coalitions," they could rely on Communist parties of varying but
not inconsiderable strength. The fifth column was there to support their
claims, and while the false god of Communism failed most of its believers (as
Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and others have told us), it
fuiled too late and too slowly.
It is important to remember this nightmare from which we are waking
up today. I remember it well, for I was a young man in Berlin when the
Russians came at the end ofApril 1945. Our family welcomed them warmly
because I had been hiding for weeks after my unexpected release from the
concentration camp in which I had spent the previous winter, and above all
because we were waiting for my father, who was in prison for his
involvement in the Resistance - notably in the plot to assassinate Hitler on
July 20, 1944. He survived, but his friends who were killed by the Nazis
had left him the message that there must never be disunity in the labor
movement again. At first, the Communist leaders who had returned from
their Soviet exile did not want to hear this message. They thought that they
could go it alone, and in any case they did not like the Social Democrats,
whom they had denounced as "social fascists" a mere five years before.
Within a year, attitudes turned full circle. Soon the Communists realized that
they would not win free elections; apart from the Italian city of Bologna, the
Indian state of Kerala, and one or two other places, Communists have never
won free elections anywhere, and so they put pressure on the Social
Democrats to form a "Socialist Unity Party." By that time my father, who
never succumbed to the pressures or the temptations of totalitarianism of any
ilk, had made up his mind.
As
vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the
East German Social Democrats, he voted against the forced merger, and had
to flee to the West. I confess that while
Schadenfreude
is not the most noble
of emotions, I watched with some pleasure the disintegration of that miser–
able assemblage of privileged cowards which called itself the SED.
On all this, however, you probably agree. But what about the other,
the Social Democratic, thread of development since 1917? One key
difference is now apparent. Whereas Communism and really existing
socialism engaged in their own constitutional politics and set up monopolies of
unfettered party power wherever they could, Social Democracy after 1917
