Youth behind the Iron Curtain

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33514, 20 April 1974, Page 10

Youth behind the Iron Curtain

The Hero’s Children: The Post-war Generation in Eastern Europe. By Paul Neuburg. Constable. 364 pp. Bibliography and index. What do young people in Eastern Europe really think of the Communist system? They have known no other; they have little opportunity, with the Czech and Hungarian experience of Russian tanks hanging over them, of ever making their true feelings known. But Paul Neuburg has special qualifications to discuss a subject which could be critically important if an EastWest detente is ever to mean more than a series of earnest liberal platitudes. Mr Neuburg grew up in Hungary until 1956 when he escaped to the West at the age of 17. His heart appears to have stayed in Eastern Europe. As often as possible he has returned there; wherever he has gone he has talked to people his own age or younger. The result is a remarkable book from a remarkable man who is willing to concede that Communism can have a human face, at least in Eastern Europe, when not reinforced by Russian .thugs — but that it is still not the first choice of a life-style for himself or many of his contemporaries. This is not a book which can be easily summarised

without doing an injustice to its tightly argued struc : ture or to the carefully detailed case studies. One conclusion emerges — the Communist Party, that monolithic monstrosity born of Lenin’s sordid genius, has lost whatever heroic appeal it once had for those who felt themselves at a disadvantage in Eastern Europe a generation ago. It has become, simply, a bureaucracy and a means of social and economic advancement — a rather inefficient and unsatisfying multi-national corporation. Mr Neuburg, even though he has chosen to live in the West, believes that the individual parties in Eastern Europe are capable of being much more effective in determining the direction of the societies they claim to represent. With enormous personal reasons for bitterness against the Communist sys-

tern, Mr Neuburg still believes that the national parties can revitalise the societies in which they exist. The parties offer a means of modernisation and education, a means of smoothing the passage for the great number of internal migrants from countryside to towns in Eastern Europe in the last decade or more. If the new generation, shorn of illusions, can only take over the parties and remake them into something resembling its own complex and generous aspirations, Eastern Europe might still be able to rejoin the main stream of civilisation of which it has hardly formed part since the collapse of the AustroHungarian Empire. Unless, of course, Russian tanks, battened down for action, reappear in the streets of Prague, or Budapest, or Cracow, or Bucharest, or even East Berlin ...