My Crazy Century: A Memoir

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A young Czech editor from BBC Radio, for whom I sometimes wrote commentary, once asked me, “Why don’t you write about why you were a Communist in your youth? I think listeners would be very interested.”

I realized that although I had used many of my experiences as material for my prose, I had avoided my several-year membership in the Communist Party, perhaps with the exception of a few mildly autobiographical passages in my novel Judge on Trial.

For quite a long time now I have considered the Communist Party or, more precisely, the Communist movement, a criminal conspiracy against democracy. And it is not pleasant to remember that, even though it was for only a short period, I had been a member of this party.

But was my young colleague from the BBC correct? Who today could be interested in the reasons why so many people from my generation succumbed to an ideology that had its roots deep in the thinking, in the social situation and societal atmosphere, of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

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