I recently heard some of the cast of the film Amadeus talk about their experiences making that film in Prague around 1980. This was, of course, about 9 years before the fall of the Berlin wall when the former Czechoslovakia was still a communist state.
The reminiscences centred around the peculiar difficulties encountered when filming in a communist country. In particular, the actor Simon Callow recalled how a group of Czech film extras, when the film’s banquet scene had been completed, fell upon and devoured the food (the food used in the film was, apparently, of very good quality). Callow’s recollection gave one to suppose that conditions in communist Czechoslovakia were so harsh that its citizens were virtually starving.
I visited Czechoslovakia a only couple of years before Callow, yet my experience was very different from his.
I was backpacking and used hitch hiking as a means of getting around. Food was plentiful and, moreover, was some of the best I have ever tasted on my (extensive) travels. The food was, in fact, one of the highlights of the trip. For example, there were cake/coffee shops everywhere serving a large variety of delicious cream cakes and pastries with good coffee. Czech beer was plentiful and particularly flavoursome. Restaurants were also common and, like the cafes, were busy with Czechs, not foreign tourists. These served good portions of nourishing, meaty stews and goulashes as well as a variety of other Czech dishes; ham and eggs (cooked in a particular Czech way) served with soft, freshly baked rolls dripping with melted butter became a breakfast staple. In other words, I saw no sign of starvation in Czechoslovakia. Quite the reverse.
My experience of Czechoslovakia, then, was totally different from Callow’s. One of us has to be wrong. Who? I think it is Callow who is wrong.
The reason is: Callow’s version of Czechoslovakia sounded as if it had come straight from a western book or a newspaper. It did not sound authentic, in other words.
In addition, I have met this sort of thing frequently on my travels in, for example, Morocco, China, Turkey and the former USSR. When I hear other visitors (and journalists) talk about their experiences in these countries, they too sound as if they are speaking from books or newspapers rather than using their own eyes and ears and forming their own opinions. And with the exception of China, if the country is communist, the views expressed are invariably negative, and exactly those one reads in the western press/books.
So, when I visited communist Russia a few years after Czechoslovakia, I remember how our tour guide, Lara, whom we befriended, would smile ruefully at the peculiar ideas western tourists harboured about her country e.g. lack of freedom, KGB round every corner, poor living conditions, bad food and little of it etc, etc. She eventually said to us, laughing: “What on earth kind of country do western tourists think they are coming to?”