"A FINAL WORD: I belong to a
generation that has been sacrificed by history. The men and
women who came to communism in the glow of the October
Revolution carried along by the great momentum of the rising
revolution certainly did not imagine that fifty years later,
nothing would be left of Lenin but the body embalmed in Red
Square. The revolution has degenerated and we have gone down
with it.
"This century has brought forth two
monsters, fascism and Stalinism, and our ideal has been
engulfed in this apocalypse. The absolute idea that gave
meaning to our lives has aquired a face whose features we no
longer recognise. Our failure forbids us to give advice, but
because history has too much imagination to repeat itself, it
remains possible to hope.
"I do not regret the commitment of my
youth, I do not regret the paths I have taken. In Denmark, in
the fall of 1973, a young man asked me in a public meeting,
'Haven't you sacrificed your life for nothing?' I replied,
'No.'
"No, on one condition: that people
understand the lesson of my life as a communist and a
revolutionary, and do not turn themselves over to a deified
party. I know that youth will succeed where we have failed,
that socialism will triumph and that it will not have
the colour of the Russian tanks that crushed Prague."
