Dear Anne,
19th August 2000
Let me be clear. I hate communism. I am vicariously proud of my great uncle’s fight against the Bolsheviks during the civil war in the Baltic from 1918-20, and of my father’s role in helping to undermine communism as head of the Russian and later the East European Services of the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s. I went as a journalist to report on the Mujahedin fight against Soviet occupation in the late 1980s, and the Baltic independence struggle of the early 1990s, partly as a result of this anti-communist sentiment. And I agree with every word of Nicolas Werth’s recent chronicle of Soviet atrocities in The Black Book of Communism, which destroys for good the left-wing fiction that a line can be drawn between the “good” Lenin and the “wicked” Stalin.
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