It was in Timişoara or Temesvár (the town where later the Rumanian revolution started) when one summer morning my fiancée’s mother woke me up – we didn’t sleep in the same room with my bride, not in those days – and simply said, ‘They went in’. ‘They’ had been the Soviet army and its East German, Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian allies. The place they entered was Prague. The day was the 21st of August, 1968.

I was twenty years old, a member of the Transylvanian Hungarian minority in Rumania, a student, coming from a leftist – as it was called, a ‘movement’ or ‘illegalist’ – family, myself vaguely on the Left which meant in that country, where the only official ideology was vicious, especially anti-Hungarian ethnic nationalism, to be somehow against the system. It was Sunday (all such attacks are made on Sundays to surprise the somnolent enemy), the town was deserted, we, Anna and I, went to the General Post Office to send off protest telegrams. The panicky clerk took them without a murmur.

My life has been decided for me.

But God, it was a lonely decision.

Among my fellow students, the ethnic Rumanians had been against the occupation of Czechoslovakia because they loathed Russians and Hungarians. The ethnic Hungarians were cautiously for the occupation because they were on principle against all official policy, and the dictator, Ceauşescu had mobilised the population in the event of a Russian invasion (hundreds of thousands joined the armed Patriotic Guards), moreover they hated the Petite Entente nations, chiefly Rumanians and Czechs. All despised Western students and workers on the basis of ‘we could tell those idiots with their ridiculous red flags a thing or two on communism’ and they were, as usual, convinced that it was a huge Jewish cabal again, ‘Cohn-Bendit, eh?’

To be a minority Hungarian and to be against the occupation (in which the official Hungary has participated) and to be ‘for the Czechs’ who, with the Rumanians and the Serbs have stolen our territories of Greater Hungary and have made us into second-rate citizens of the ‘successor states’: this was much too much. Akin to treason, betraying your own kind. Talking to Rumanian intellectuals, it was clear that the majority position was: you cannot condemn one communist crime, committed in Prague, and join another communist cause in Paris, Berkeley, West Berlin, Milan and wherever: one is a dictatorship, already installed, the other, a dictatorship in the making. ‘Red fascism’ was the slogan of the day. And well, yes, drugs, fornication, anti-nation decadence, mass craze, the need for a strong hand. Poets who as anti-communists considered themselves to be rebels in spite of the fact that they had been encouraged by the Cultural Ministry to compose such odes, sang the praises of the military as a way of life: pride, chastity, violence.

I have met a single person then who shared my commitments, an old friend of my parents, professor of aesthetics and comparative literature, who was expelled from the underground communist party in 1940 for having voiced doubts about the Soviet-German non-aggression pact signed by Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentropp. He was declared a Trotskyite what he never quite was. His wife and two small children perished in Auschwitz. He was expelled again from the party in the 1950s, fired from the university (they let him back later). He never rejoined the party as most people did who left the prisons of their comrades in the sixties. He used to be a communist student himself in Paris in the 1930s – I have just reread the afterword to one of his collections of essays, published in 1972, where he says he regrets all those months spent in the Bibliothèque nationale reading Lenin instead of Sainte-Beuve or Thibaudet or Roman Jakobson. He spoke 11 languages fluently. We met on the street in Cluj or Kolozsvár, he was flushed, eyes a-glitter, spectacles askew, hair and moustache every which way, a little old gentleman whith his briefcase, fountain pen and lead pencils in his breast pocket, he was – again – in the mood of  ‘oh to be alive…’ and so on and so forth. But nothing stirred. We exchanged newspapers and magazines. I remember Combat, then the Vienna Tagebuch of the premature eurocommunist Franz Marek, Le Nouvel Observateur and a lot besides, chaotically, what we could lay our hands on, including, horror of horrors, the Peking Review and China Reconstructs  (these latter two were devoid of any reasonable content, I must say). My poor old friend collected all this from various sources in the hope of distributing it to young acolytes but, except yours truly, no takers. And it was no great conquest to talk to somebody who, after all, was the son of two people from his own party cell back in 1937 – but don’t forget that the mere fact of being a party member then meant three years of prison (dungeon, rather) without the option.

I felt I should hide from my acquaintances rather than from the secret police.

From those days, I associate revolution with solitude.

When I hear les nouveaux philosophes or, which is the same thing, President Sarkozy discoursing about 1968, I don’t have to follow very carefully. I heard it all, forty years ago, in Transylvania. From ‘lazy bums’ to ‘drugged fanatics’ to ‘terrorists’ to ‘messianic utopians’ to ‘enemies of democracy’. Neither then, nor today did or do most people want to know, apart from an axe-grinding minority I still belong to, that 1968 was first and foremost a proletarian battle which the real enemies of democracy in the PCF and the PCI (the CGT and the CGIL) wanted and finally managed to throttle. The same people whose brothers-in-arms trampled on the Prague spring. The successors of those who voted for the war credits in 1914. The successors of those communists who found it expedient to organise show trials against Marxists in Barcelona and Madrid during the civil war, utterly uninterested in Franco’s advance. The world is not that complicated.

I don’t mind ‘lifestyle Guevaristas’ and people who love revolutions when safely past. They could love things infinitely worse.

But I also recall that the only moment when I was not politically lonely, was in 1989, the far side of Thermidor, against the actual legacy of which I am now compelled to work, that is, against myself and against my own and only moment of collective happiness.

The revolutions I approve of and love continue to remind me of solitude. This is not history. This is just a story.