By Brian Hanrahan
BBC News
Dissidents in Eastern Europe had a bitter joke about the communist approach to compromise. "What do you do when you’ve made someone 99% communist," it went. Answer: "Beat the other 1% out."
It was the approach adopted across the entire Eastern bloc.
Communism wanted to control not just politics but the entirety of daily life. It dictated how people should behave and think. It wanted to run industry, set university syllabuses, and decide what they could read.
Those who questioned the state could lose their jobs, and their homes. Everyday life could be made a misery by denying them the right to buy furniture or travel to another town. Their children’s education could suffer.
When I was stationed in Moscow I ran up against government controls all the time.
I even had to import wood to put up shelves because the local shops refused to sell me any.
Because the state owned and ran everything, it could mess with you in a thousand different ways. But I could leave, the people who lived there would have to put up with it until they died.
Ghost world
In Czechoslovakia – which had suppressed the reforms of the Prague Spring in 1968 – there was a particularly chilling quality to the way that conformity was enforced.
Jan Urban, a leading figure in the 1989 Velvet Revolution, took me along to the secret police archives to show how it was done.
Here was a ghost world that was never meant to see the light of day – 25km of shelving filled with fading files documenting how the StB , the Czechoslovak secret police, went about harassing and intimidating the handful of souls brave enough to stand up against them.
Mr Urban paid for his defiance. His pregnant wife was interrogated and lost their child. Local authorities questioned them about child neglect. He received death threats over his tapped telephone. And once he was sent a coffin with his name on it.
All of this happened in a country where nothing could happen without the authorities say-so.
The files show how the dissidents were watched by up to a dozen secret agents at a time – with a minute-by-minute log of what trams they caught and what they were wearing.
There are snatched photographs of people they encountered in the street – all in the hope of finding something that could be used against them.
Mental resistance
This is the first time that Jan Urban has looked at the records and at first he was amused at how many people were deployed to follow and analyse his movements.
But when he remembers the microphones plastered into his bedroom and his children’s room, his equanimity snaps.
"They were filth," he says, "a criminal organisation. What was the point, except intimidation."
But intimidation was the point. Dissent was the one thing that communism could not tolerate. Simply by existing – by holding different views – the dissidents were challenging the state.
They circulated poetry and plays without permission. They organised underground theatre with banned actors and actresses.
One performance of Macbeth was raided by the police, and so many of the audience were followed that the street outside resembled a secret policeman’s convention.
Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who was to become president, argued that it was important to behave as though they were not oppressed.
The more the state tried to occupy all public space, the more it would be undermined by those who carried out normal activities outside it.
Mr Havel was an influential voice in a debate that shaped the way dissidents behaved across the whole Soviet bloc.
So was Adam Michnik, who had told Poles that a society in captivity must produce an illegal literature if it was to know the truth about itself.
Another was Andrey Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist, who would not be silenced by rewards or punishment.
The common concept was that mental resistance could in time bring down even a totalitarian state.
They shaped their philosophy of resistance at secret summits held between dissident leaders in the mountains that bordered Czechoslovakia and Poland.
And the skills gained in organising themselves – even on innocuous issues – meant they had the ability and reputation to step into the vacuum when communism collapsed. It averted a struggle for power that could have become bloody and brutal.
Plastic People
But the unlikely inspiration for many Czech intellectuals was a psychedelic rock group who were banned by the Czech government.
"We weren’t political. We were just trying to be poetical"
Vratislav Brabenec
Plastic People of the Universe
The Plastic People of the Universe were jailed for performing at an underground rock festival in 1976.
They are still in business and I found them playing in a muddy field about an hour’s drive outside Prague, and bickering with the organiser who said he did not have the money to pay them.
Vratislav Brabenec, their saxophonist then and now, looked much as John Lennon might if he were alive today: round-rimmed glasses, long greying hair, with a quirky sense of humour, and a continuing lack of respect towards authority.
"We weren’t political, man," he said. "We were just trying to be poetical."
As to why they would not accept government control, he answered: "That’s freedom, man, I’d die for that."
But whether they wanted to be or not, they found themselves at the heart of the political battle.
Mr Urban practically wrinkles his nose at the mention of them. He does not like their music and thinks they are dirty and drink too much.
But he adds: "The minute they got into trouble, I was on their side. Everyone has the right to express themselves. They became the symbol."
If the state had not jailed them, the Plastic People would have been just another bloody-minded band of rockers.
Instead they became the rallying cry for Charter 77 – the human rights declaration penned by the Czech dissidents which fuelled a decade-long struggle with the communist authorities.
They also taught a whole new generation about dissent. By listening to music the state wanted to ban, they learnt the habit of rebellion – and so were bred the student activists of 1989. </p
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Smack on the funny bone
Politicians under fire from satirists should never rub their bruises. The smart move is to laugh along
David Cameron has made clear that he will look around the world for new political ideas and must be tempted by an initiative being trialled in Pakistan. If President Zardari’s attempt to ban the dissemination of jokes about him – through a new cyber crimes act, targeting blog comedy, text jests and email facetiousness – were to be introduced in the UK, Channel 4 could be prevented from screening a film, revealed this week, that will recreate the events leading up to a notorious photo of Bullingdon Club members including Cameron and Boris Johnson.
This film continues a recent British tradition of attacking politicians early in their careers. Once, a leader would have had to form at least one administration before meriting a feature-length TV demolition. But Blair and Brown were picked off as aspirants and even Michael Howard, although he never became prime minister, was subjected to a peak-time comedy about a draconian home secretary aiming higher.
Although being spread through new technology, the kind of jokes that Zardari objects to have an older history: one of them – that the great leader has asked for his face to go on a stamp but citizens aren’t sure which side to spit on – was applied, for example, to Richard Nixon. Curiously, the British figure most vulnerable to the gag – Elizabeth II – has avoided it, even among republicans.
That particular line of attack has a limited shelf-life – not because of a rise in political competence but the spread of self-adhesive stamps – but the leader of Pakistan is surely doomed in his attempt to introduce a gagging order on gags and, anyway, he has perhaps over-estimated their power.
Objectively, it is difficult to argue that political satire has had much direct effect on history. Richard Nixon, though seared by comedians throughout his career, was brought down by journalism rather than jokes. And three of the most violently caricatured politicians of modern times – Thatcher, Blair, George Bush – also served the longest terms.
All political satirists must eventually reflect on this strike rate: Ian Hislop has argued persuasively that political humour is not useless simply because it fails to achieve immediate regime-change: he believes that there is a moral imperative at least to have tried. And there is also, clearly, a greatly cheering and cathartic effect for those members of the population who didn’t vote for the leader in question. A recent book anthologising jokes told in eastern Europe during the cold war touchingly showed the way in which humour can be a democratic immune system, keeping the dissident spirit alive.
Also – as the president of Pakistan’s leaden intervention has proved – there is considerable comfort in knowing that the jokes have hit home. The satirists of Nixon could do nothing about his fat mandates but they could be cheered by his visibly thin skin.
One reason that Margaret Thatcher was a more effective premier than John Major was that she showed no sign of knowing the jokes about her – and would deliver speech-written gags that she didn’t understand – whereas he liked to challenge journalists and cartoonists on whether their slights were fair. Like batsmen hit by bouncers, politicians should never rub their bruises.
The most revealing aspect of Zardari’s crackdown is that it targets the newer media. This reflects a feeling among politicians that, for the present generation of leaders, the tactics of character assassination have escalated. In fact, the gags are simply more visible: what was once spoken on street corners now leaves a cyber-trail, which Zardari has foolishly chased. But new technologies will usually defeat censorship.
In this sense, at a very small level, there is a link between Channel 4′s Cameron film and Zardari’s ban. The Conservative leader has imposed his own limits on wit by securing the withdrawal of the Bullingdon picture from public use. Opponents have got round this by recreating the photo in various ways – the TV comedy is another example.
What’s really funny about what happened in Pakistan, though, is that politicians in other countries are going to have to be tremendously good-humoured about any attacks on them because of the risk that they will be compared to Zardari.
By taking offence at jests, President Zardari has made himself a laughing stock. A man who tried to weaken political humour has demonstrated its strength. As the touchy John Major said, in a different context, if it’s hurting, it’s working. Skilled politicians know that the smart move is to join in the jokes, no matter how much they sting. Team Cameron, if it is sensible, will already be working on some wry, self-deprecating quip for their reluctant film star on the night of the Bullingdon transmission.