Mick Hartley

Edward Lucas, in the Times (£), was a journalist in Prague during the Soviet era. He was followed around, had his flat bugged and his phone cut off, and finally, in 1989, was given a severe beating by the secret police. So no, he's not impressed by Corbyn:

I do not regard Jeremy Corbyn’s dalliance with the London representatives of the Czechoslovak regime as a trivial Cold War curio. While he and other left-wingers were hobnobbing with the emissaries of the Soviet empire, its victims were experiencing treatment — far worse than mine — that would curdle the blood of any true campaigner for freedom and justice.

The best and brightest Czechs and Slovaks were fired from their jobs in the purges that followed the 1968 Soviet-led invasion. They worked as bricklayers, street-sweepers or stokers. If they spoke out, they faced arrest, harassment, blackmail and jail. Their children were banned from going to university. The best-known of these dissidents, the philosopher-playwright Václav Havel, was in prison when I arrived in Prague. He was president when I left.  […]

If you wanted examples of exploitation, imperialism and warmongering, the obvious place to start was the Soviet empire. The Kremlin not only had the blood of millions of people on its hands, plus countless more lives ruined by repression and terror. It had invaded and despoiled other countries, installing puppet regimes that ruled by fear.

Many on the British left saw this with admirable clarity. But not Mr Corbyn. I have been unable to find anything he said in support of the Czechoslovak dissidents. When the Soviet empire collapsed, he even bemoaned the damage done to the “anti-imperialist” cause.

I do not believe Mr Corbyn was a paid or conscious agent of the StB. The memories of his supposed case officer are not supported by anything in the files. Indeed the paperwork clearly shows that Mr Corbyn was merely a target for recruitment (as indeed was I: my StB codename was Times, I later discovered).

Mr Corbyn was a “useful idiot”, in the phrase apocryphally attributed to Lenin. His open, visceral anti-westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.

I wish the Labour leader could remember his encounters with the StB as clearly as I do mine. I wish even more that he understood what they were really about.