Comrade Blake's Last Will and Testament:
1966: The Blake prison escape
A short history of the miraculous prison break of Soviet double-agent George Blake from a British jail, organised by two libertarian activists.libcom.org
And thats just the tip of a very large iceberg
I had a vague awareness of this jailbreak, but didn't know/remember Blake being KGB. A little surprised the support from pacifists towards KGB Agents TBH
Yet unbelievably there was a revival of nostalgia for the GDR by some East Germans called Ostalgie and some interesting films Lives Others , Goodbye Lenin and Sonnenallee in particular, which portrayed a more complex view of the GDR from the normal one dimensional one.
Observer headline said:
Stephen Dorril said:
This is another liberal lie, the economy grew at a rapid pace right from 49 and it was only the hiatus during the policy disaster of the Great Leap that it really slowed. Life expectancy grew even with the murderous famine added in, the population grew rapidly at the same time yet endemic famine was ended in a country that had started from a lower base than much of sub-Saharan Africa due to the years of warlord infighting and at the same time they constructed an industrial base and did things they thought necessary to secure their status as an independent nation state like the atom bomb.
I'm not sure what you are asking for - people who do know of Dorril and his work to vouch for the book?Loads of fascinating historical detail about George Blake in today's Observer article by Stephen Dorril
Dorill was the author of a book called "MI6 : Fifty Years of Special Operations" -- does anyone know much about that book and about Dorill himself?
He was also the co-author of Smear! -- the Lobster book about Harold Wilson -- does that reduce the credibility of all the above stuff??
It depends where you were, also. One of my colleagues is from one of the 'stans (I'd better not say which, as the human rights situation has actually deteriorated there since 1991). She told me that one of her grandmothers was put in an arranged marriage at the age of 14, and set to work tending the new family's cows. The Bolsheviks put an end to that, she said (OTOH, both of her grandfathers had to temporarily absent themselves during the forced collectivisation, and hide out in China - only one of them made it back).
And a lot of this is all about flicking the two fingers at the Wessis. One west German I knew in Halle summed up the difference between east and west like this: a West German walking through town at night would stop and wait for the green man at the pedestrian light. An Ossi would look at that sort of behaviour and say "have you lost your mind? It's the middle of the night".
How disruptive in economic terms was the GPCR?
Off the top of my head, IIRC surprisingly not very, but I'll have to check. Combination of the particular venues it mainly played out and the major upheavals being in fact briefer than the usual ten year timeframe suggested.
When my mother lived in Spain I used to go to a German bar for the beer and after one session I summoned up the courage to ask about the wall coming down . Some spoke English but the bloke behind the bar translated for me . Most of the people in there had tales about how lazy the East Germans were , that one west German would do a job but the East Germans would expect 4 do do it etc etc . Aside from some old guy sitting by himself who said ‘the west Germans economy meant if you worked hard there was less jobs because they didn’t need you , in the East the economy’s job was to provide work , we didn’t have unemployment’
