Today, when thousands of British holidaymakers visit Prague every year to enjoy its spectacular architecture and glorious beer, it’s easy to forget how different that great city once was.
In the mid-Eighties, the capital of what was then Czechoslovakia was a grey, frightened place, shivering behind the Iron Curtain.
Daily life was ruthlessly controlled by the Communist Party. Free speech was forbidden. Dissent was routinely punished by long stretches in prison.
It is a sign of how far Mr Corbyn has taken the Labour party to the Left that this week’s revelation about those meetings with an agent from a Soviet bloc country seems almost unremarkable
Far from being a socialist paradise, this was a society in which independent thought marked people out as traitors.
Anyone who came to the attention of the secret police, the infamous StB, had their phone tapped, their apartment watched and they were even followed in the street.
Push too far against the system, and they might lose their job, even their home. They might be forbidden from travelling to another town. They might even find their own children used as spies against them.
In the West, most viewed this regime with utter horror. But not everybody. There were always apologists for tyranny.
In 1986, a secret police agent held three meetings in London with a young MP, Jeremy Corbyn. He handed the agent a report about British security activities, talked bitterly about the United States, as well as about the policies of the Thatcher government.
Jeremy Corbyn (pictured in 1984) warned a Soviet-backed spy about British intelligence activity at the climax of the Cold War, according to secret documents
But he was ‘positive’ about the Eastern Bloc — including the regime in Czechoslovakia — and had warm words for the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, specifically a ‘peace initiative’ that was actually a poorly disguised attempt to encourage Western nuclear disarmament.
It is a sign of how far Mr Corbyn has taken the Labour party to the Left that this week’s revelation about those meetings with an agent from a Soviet bloc country seems almost unremarkable.
That said, University of Buckingham professor Anthony Glees, an expert on Cold War intelligence, says that Mr Corbyn was guilty, even at best, of ‘breathtaking naivety’.
But that is surely far too generous.
In the mid-Eighties, few had any illusions about the blood-stained cruelty of the Communist bloc. It was, after all, almost two decades since historian Robert Conquest had published his ground-breaking book The Great Terror, which proved Stalin had murdered millions during the Thirties.
Mr Corbyn had a choice. Nobody forced him to meet a man very obviously working for the Czechoslovakian secret police.
Most Labour MPs would have refused in a heartbeat. But Mr Corbyn went along — and not just once, but three times.
Inevitably, Mr Corbyn’s cult members have tried to excuse this as proof of his refreshingly idealistic independent-mindedness.
In truth, it is yet more proof of his membership of that most closed-minded, conformist and predictable tribe of all: the bien-pensant North London Left. These are people for whom patriotism is a dirty word, the West is the fount of evil and the Communist experiment has been unjustly maligned.
The Labour leader met the Czech agent at least three times after being vetted by communist handlers in 1986, papers reveal
The type could hardly be more familiar. As early as 1941, George Orwell wrote that the high-minded Left took ‘their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.’ They felt it their ‘duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings’.
All the time they were ‘chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British’.
And right from the start, the Kremlin saw them as ‘useful idiots’, whose deluded beliefs could be twisted to serve its own ends. In the Twenties, for example, Soviet agents recruited Norman Ewer, a senior journalist on the Labour-supporting Daily Herald. Ewer promptly recruited two Special Branch officers with Left-wing sympathies, who tipped him off about impending raids on suspected Communists.
The Herald itself was also suborned by Soviet intelligence. In 1920, senior Bolshevik Lev Kamenev told Lenin he had paid the newspaper £40,000, with the aim of winning support among the British working classes.
Mr Corbyn allegedly provided the spies with material about the arrest of an East German, according to the leaked documents
Soviet agents enjoyed their greatest success in the Thirties, when they recruited the so-called Cambridge Five — Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross — who systematically betrayed secrets to Moscow in the following decades. Their spying resulted in countless deaths and huge damage to the West.
But even today, many on the high-minded Left try to defend them. Almost unbelievably, the playwright Alan Bennett recently claimed that their treachery was not ‘particularly important’, and was ‘excusable’ because it was motivated by their genuine Marxist idealism.
In fact, it could hardly have been more important, or indeed less excusable.
Two examples of their betrayal: Guy Burgess handed over 4,000 documents to his Soviet handler in the last year of World War II. And Kim Philby passed details of a planned landing by Western-backed exiles in Albania in 1948, ensuring that hundreds of men were rounded up and killed.
Mr Corbyn was not in their league. He was not a spy, for the obvious reason that he never had access to secret information.
One page of the documents reveals contact was established with Mr Corbyn twice in 1986
Back in 1986, the Czechs probably saw the backbench Labour MP as an ‘agent of influence’, like the former union leader Jack Jones who took payments from the KGB until breaking with them over their brutal repression in Czechoslovakia.
So in other words, Jeremy Corbyn was perfectly happy to sit down with the very people whom Jack Jones, a Marxist, rejected as too extreme. That says it all about Mr Corbyn’s lack of a moral compass.
Mr Corbyn was not the only Labour MP targeted by Communist spy agencies.
Tom Driberg, a homosexual, was almost certainly recruited as a KGB agent after being blackmailed about his wildly promiscuous sex life.
An even more notorious example was Labour MP John Stonehouse, best known for mysteriously disappearing on a Florida beach in 1974 before turning up in Australia and then being imprisoned for fraud.
It transpired that Stonehouse, a junior minister in the Wilson government, had passed secrets to Mr Corbyn’s chums in Czechoslovakian intelligence for years in return for payment of so-called ‘red gold’.
Years later, Stonehouse claimed he’d fallen victim to a honey-trap in the Fifties, his lover sending ‘sensations of joy to every crevice of his brain’ and spurring him on to one last ‘magnificent thrust’ — at which point he realised that the Czechs were filming him through a mirror in the ceiling.
All of this might sound comical. But when you consider the nature
of the regimes these men served — the prison camps, the walls and wires, the everyday cruelty and unending repression — there is nothing funny about it.
Many others allowed themselves to be suborned by the Communists.
The writer George Bernard Shaw defended Stalin’s reign of terror on the grounds that people sometimes needed to be ‘pushed off the ladder with a rope around their necks’. His friend H. G. Wells claimed he had ‘never met a man more candid, fair and honest’ than Stalin.
As a historian, I am sorry to say that my own profession was particularly culpable. The most infamous example was probably the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, even now a hero to many on the Left, who, disgracefully, said that the ‘sacrifice of millions of lives’ would be worth it for a Communist utopia.
An even more shocking example was Christopher Hill, who ended his career as the Master of my old Oxford college, Balliol. A brilliant historian of the English Civil War, he denied there had been a famine in Ukraine in the Thirties and defended Stalin’s Terror as ‘non-violent’.
Later, it transpired Hill had been recruited by the NKVD, the forerunners of the KGB, while visiting the Soviet Union in the Thirties. Working in the Foreign Office during the Forties, he regularly passed secrets to his handlers; one expert even calls him ‘one of the best placed Communist moles in Britain’. He never paid for his betrayal — ending his academic career as one of the most respected intellectuals in the land.
By these standards, Jeremy Corbyn’s actions might look insignificant. Yet I think they could hardly be more revealing. The Czech secret police — ruthless, murderous men who hated Britain and everything it stood for — saw him as a potential agent of influence.
His defenders say that those were different times, that he was naïve, not wicked. I don’t buy it. This was 1986, not 1926. People knew what life behind the Iron Curtain was like.
Yet the record shows beyond doubt that, at a time when Eastern European dissidents were still being persecuted, imprisoned and tortured, Mr Corbyn was happy to strike up a relationship with one of the regime’s secret policemen.
The record also shows he has changed his views very little. As his enthusiasm for regimes such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran suggests, Mr Corbyn has never wavered in his admiration for dictators, his hatred of many Western values and his contempt for our national security.
I believe that Mr Corbyn is not merely unfit to serve as Labour’s leader, he is not even fit to serve as a Labour MP.
One more thing. We now know of his links with the Czech secret police. But what about the East Germans? What about the Bulgarians, the Hungarians and the Poles? And what about the Russians? What have they got on him? Wouldn’t you just love to know?