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I visited the old Soviet Union twice (1966 and 1970). For my first visit abroad I traveled by train, with a group of others, across Belgium, West Germany, thru the divided city of Berlin and East Germany and Poland to the Soviet border and onward to Moscow. The second time I flew in luxury with other honored British Communist Party customers of Aeroflot for the Lenin Centenary, plied with caviar, chocolates and champagne on the flight to Leningrad.

So impressed was I by my short sight of modern East Berlin from the train, that when as a CND employee I was offered a free holiday in the German Democratic Republic with my colleague Sheila Cooper in 1968, I jumped at the chance. This holiday was paid for by Friedensrat der DDR, the Peace Council of the GDR. I can't believe we hitched all the way there and back, since we had little money. Well, we caught a train from Hanover to Berlin because we were running out of time, but otherwise we hitched all the way, entering the GDR Capital by walking thru Checkpoint Charlie. On the way out in West Germany we were invited to stay overnight at the house of someone who gave us a lift. When we discovered his wife had escaped from East Germany we just told them we were going to Berlin, not daring to mention we were in fact heading for East Berlin as guests of the East German government's Peace Council!

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels V. I. Lenin, Berlin Karl Marx Allee (formerly Stalin Allee)

We were in Berlin, Capital of the GDR (East Berlin's official title) when Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and attended a big rally in Marx-Engels Platz celebrating this 'liberation' as VIP guests of the government on the visitors' platform. We were also taken on a guided tour of the 'Anti-Fascist Wall of Peace' and were invited right up to the Wall at the Western side of the Brandenburg Gate to climb a platform reserved for guests of the East German government to peer across at Westerners looking back at us from just over the Wall by the Reichstag building. It was a very eerie experience. We also visited other towns in the GDR, including Rostock and the nearby seaside resort of Kuhlungsborn.

Unter Den Linden and Brandenburg Gate Walter Ulbricht Unter Den Linden and TV Tower

I returned to the GDR with my partner in 1976 for an extensive tour. But he pointed out all the defects in the system I preferred not to see, and on my return I finally resigned from the Communist Party of Great Britain, and as Treasurer of my local Party branch.

Brandenburg Gate from Western side of Wall Erich Honecker Palace of the Republic

However, we did make two more visits to a Socialist country together. We visited Yugoslavia twice in the 1980s, and I also went again to that country with my mother also in the 1980s.

I have often thought of making a return visit to Berlin now that the Wall is gone and the city re-united. I don't think I could bear it. Despite all its faults, I loved the old GDR and its capital city. I'd hate to see all the commercialism, and the destruction of all the monuments to Socialism - the Lenin/Karl Marx statues, the streets named after German and other working class and Communist heroes, the Karl Marx Allee shops, Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, the modern Unter den Linden and Alexanderplatz developments, the wonderful S-bahn serving both East and West Berlin but run by the GDR authorities, the towering spherical TV tower and the surprisingly well-dressed East Berliners. Of course many of these are still there, but they are no longer shining examples of Socialism, more like graveyard monuments to the GDR and Socialism. Nothing more so than the Palace of the Republic, the old GDR parliament building and people's leisure center. I heard it is still standing, but in a very sorry state. I doubt if its Hammer and Compass crest, emblem of the GDR, still survives on its frontage.

Nor could I bear to visit Moscow or Leningrad (now renamed St Petersburg, a German name. Surely they could at least have chosen the Russian Petrograd?) I remember Moscow's splendid Stalinist skyscrapers, a Socialist imitation of New York's art-deco ones. The marvelous Stalinist Metro with its underground cathedrals of Socialism, furnished with chandeliers from the Tsars' palaces. The massive monuments to a Communist future - the Worker and Collective Farm Girl holding aloft a giant hammer and sickle sticks in my memory. Have all Socialist monuments and hammer and sickle crests gone, swept away by commercialism and the logos of capitalism? At least poor old Lenin is still on display in his mausoleum in Red Square, for the time being, but probably soon to be sponsored by Coca-Cola or McDonalds!

Most of all I could not bear to visit Yugoslavia, that beautiful country which, like the GDR and Soviet Union, exists no more. Yugoslavia, both my partner and I agreed, came closest to the ideal Socialist society. They created a successful Market Socialism based on competing worker/consumer cooperatives and publicly owned companies. True they never achieved true democracy, but at least they made Socialism work efficiently.

The wave of mass-hysteria which swept the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Thatcher-Reagan era from 1989 onwards resulted in not just the destruction of the Berlin Wall, but these three Socialist states - the USSR, the GDR and the Yugoslav federation. Terrible, brutal ethnic and nationalistic wars took place in former Yugoslavia and parts of the Soviet Union. How could people bound together by Socialism for so long commit such brutal acts against each other? I just couldn't visit Yugoslavia again knowing what these people had done to each other, despite all that Tito and others had taught them. Similarly with the former Soviet republics - that mighty Socialist Soviet Union has been broken up, and brutal ethnic/nationalist conflicts continue despite all the efforts of Lenin and his successors (yes, including Stalin) to establish a permanent union of peoples. I know that many of Stalin's methods were criminal and brutal in the extreme, but breaking up into warring nationalities and killing each other is no way for former Soviet citizens to behave. In the words of the first verse of the Anthem of the Soviet Union:

It breaks my heart to see this mighty Union, the Yugoslav federation and Czechoslovakia, torn apart by petty-bourgeois nationalism and ethnic hatred, whilst we in the European Union are trying to break down barriers between our countries. It is a tragedy that 'the first Socialist State on German soil', the proud German Democratic Republic built on the ashes of Hitler's Third Reich, should have been swallowed up by the capitalist West German republic, and the mighty GDR industries stolen from the people and handed over to Western capitalists. All these countries and federations could have been turned into genuine people's democracies building true Socialism, at last realizing the dreams of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V. I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Tito and others.

I sometimes despair of the world as it is today. We all know Socialism had many faults, we know it was far from perfect, that terrible crimes were committed in the Stalinist era particularly, and that opportunism and corruption resulted in a new ruling class oppressing the people. But what we have today is surely worse - the same corrupt ruling class still oppressing the people in these countries, but all the people's social security, all hope for the future, all progress towards true Socialism abandoned apparently forever. Instead the lucky people of Eastern Europe are exploited by multi-national corporations as a source of cheap labor, whilst many others are permanently unemployed.

I did visit Czechoslovakia in 1991 with my partner (now this country too has broken up into two separate states), and also Hungary. I was not disillusioned then because I had never visited them when they were Socialist, and in those early post-Socialist days I hadn't fully analyzed the situation. However I should have known that all was not well in the former Socialist countries. When the Romanian Communist dictator Ceausescu and his wife were shot on Christmas Day without even a proper trial, I had a terrible premonition in my stomach that whatever followed the imperfect, corrupt, Socialism in these countries it would not be a peaceful democracy where all past wrongs would be corrected. What happened in Romania and some other former Socialist countries was not democracy; it was a brutal power struggle amongst the ruling class.

I will probably never visit Russia, Berlin or former Yugoslavia again. They are unlikely to make a new attempt at building Socialism in my lifetime (I turn 60 this year, 2005), and I can't bear to see all that was achieved completely destroyed just so a ruling capitalist class can continue exploiting the people.

Postscript added June 1st, 2005. According to popular myth East Germany was one big atheistic prison camp with everyone clamoring to get out, and no one clamoring to get in. Not quite true. Take the remarkable case of Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union and quite possibly the next Chancellor of Germany.

Her family moved from Hamburg, in West Germany, to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1957, where her father took up a position as a Protestant minister! In later years Angela joined the Free German Youth and was cultural secretary of the organization at Leipzig University. Who knows, at 13 or 14 years of age she was probably in the sea of blue-shirted FDJers or white-shirted, red-scarved Ernst Thaelmann Young Pioneers (JP) I saw at the great rally praising the intervention in Czechoslovakia held in August 1968 in Marx-Engels Platz, Berlin (Angela lived just north of Berlin at the time). She could, of course, have joined the CDU in the German Democratic Republic, as it was a legal political party along with many others in the National Front ruling coalition, but she joined this conservative Party much later.

If she does become Chancellor of a united Germany it will be most interesting to see how a former East German citizen and FDJ member, one who's family moved East voluntarily to the Socialist state, performs and how sympathetic she is to the problems facing the people in the East of the country in particular. Perhaps an East German citizen has to become leader of a conservative Party in order to get elected Chancellor, she could hardly achieve this as leader of the Party of Democratic Socialism (the former Marxist-Leninist Party ruling East Germany) because even if everyone in East Germany voted for the PDS they would be outvoted by the West Germans.

Thank you for pointing me to your website. There are several subjects I do relate to - like your views on pacifism, capitalism or federalism.
As for the breakdown of the GDR and its subsequent takeover; I believe the citizens of the GDR were decieved by the then Chancellor of West-Germany,
who promised 'flourishing landscapes' to the East-Germans. Now 15 years on there is a high unemployment rate, a sky rocketing state deficit and
Neo-Fascism on the rise. An East-German worker still gets only about 80% of the wage his West-German counterpart gets. No wonder many East-Germans are
getting nostalgic, thinking of the 'good old days' but they make no political impact. Where are the scores of people who went out into the
streets to make their voice be heard and in the end topple the ruling system.

In my opinion is was a big mistake to re-unify the two states, only because there was a paragraph in the constitution of the FRG about 'one German
Nation'. The GDR should have remained independent with a political system of its own making. I was born in 66 in the FRG, for me it always was a fact that there were two different German states. In the 40 years the GDR and the FRG existed seperately their citizens had a whole lot of different experiences, there is
not much of a common ground other than the language, but that's also the case with the Austrians (but I never heard of unification-calls concerning
them). I don't know where Germany is heading, but I fear the situation will get much more worse. Thank you for listening to my unpolished ravings on German politics. Marik

Thanks for your comments. By uniting with the FRG former GDR citizens have disenfranchised themselves. They could never vote in a government of their choice under the GDR system, and can't now either because West Germans outnumber them. The FRG and GDR should have stayed as separate countries at least until their two political systems coincided. The two economic systems were totally different, and this has now imposed an intolerable strain on the FRG economy. You simply cannot unite a low-tax, high wage capitalist economy with a high-tax, low wage Socialist economy without causing very serious political and economic problems. With high unemployment and total lack of real Socialist policies, no wonder neo-fascism is making inroads.