PART I

Fear and Loathing in Prague

Memories of Smuggling Subversive Literature Behind the Iron Curtain

1 (i) — The revolutionary scene in late 70s London; a beautiful woman at the bar; an invitation to undertake a perilous journey

Today, the area behind King’s Cross station in London is a frenzy of new construction. Office towers and luxury apartment blocks vie to fill the remaining vacant lots around the Eurostar high-speed train terminal, where passengers depart with silky velocity to Paris and beyond. But in the mid-70s this was a desolate hinterland, with narrow rubbish-strewn streets that served as a work place for local prostitutes and home for impoverished itinerants.

It was here that the International Marxist Group (IMG), an organization dedicated to the worldwide overthrow of capitalism, had set up its headquarters, attracted by the neighborhood’s low rents and convenient transportation. In a three-story building that housed a dingy bookstore stacked with volumes on the deepening crisis of imperialism, the organization’s leadership developed its strategy for the seizure of state power. This was communicated via smudgily mimeographed bulletins mailed to a membership of a few hundred.

Public meetings were held in a pub across the road, the General Picton, named for an infamously brutal military governor of Trinidad. Upstairs, beneath the low hanging lights of an old pool table that cast the proceedings in a conspiratorial chiaroscuro, comrades debated the theory of permanent revolution, as formulated by Leon Trotsky.

It was in the General Picton that I went to my first IMG gatherings, so called “Red Circles,” open only to those interested in becoming a member of the group. The speakers were intense and cosmopolitan, their words entirely captivating to a 19-year old just arrived in the capital from the anodyne suburbs of Liverpool.

After one such meeting, I found myself continuing the discussion over a beer in the downstairs bar with a friendly local union official and his spectacularly beautiful girlfriend. (I only later discovered that they had been assigned by the organization to undertake “contact work” with me—to ease my entry into the group through regular get-togethers.) We were in the middle of excoriating the lamentable sectarianism of the International Socialists, our primary rivals on the revolutionary left, when I was approached by a tall, lightly bearded man with soft eyes and a flat nasal voice that suggested an enduring heavy cold. He was holding a hand-rolled cigarette between finger and thumb, in the manner of the working class.

The man asked if I would care to accompany him outside for a chat. My heart raced at the invitation. I was aware that he was in the leadership of the group, having heard him speak at a previous educational on why the Soviet Union should be regarded as “degenerate” under its Stalinist rulers. I had taken copious notes. What could such an elevated comrade want from someone like me, not even an official member?

I duly followed him through the pub door into a chill wind that blew old newspapers around our feet. Bracing against the blast he leaned in and, with sparks flying this way and that from the tip of his roll-up, inquired whether I would be interested in taking a trip abroad. What he was about to tell me, he said, needed to be kept strictly between ourselves. Did I understand? I could barely speak, such was my excitement. I nodded emphatically.

He went on to explain that the IMG was cooperating with a group of dissidents in Czechoslovakia in their struggle to overturn the regime there, a repressive Moscow-backed government that was anathema to democratic revolutionaries such as ourselves. To assist this work, couriers were being dispatched behind the Iron Curtain to deliver packages, primarily banned books and newspapers, but also secret communiqués. Would I would be interested in joining these efforts? He need not have asked.