Member-only story
Putin apocrypha
Here is a short story that was told to me by a friend of my parents, the American political strategist and advisor Phil Krone (1941–2010). Phil was a terrific raconteur, and his stories were often wild and improbable. One story I remember involved him being kidnapped by the Tamil Tigers and persuading them to let him go by taking them to a fancy restaurant in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
In another story, Phil was in Vienna in 1968 and wanted to travel to Budapest to see ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. He went to the Hungarian consulate, and when they refused him a visa, he lied and said he was the Chairman of the Young Communists of Illinois, which worked. Unfortunately, when his train arrived in Budapest, he was met by apparatchiks with banners reading ‘Welcome Comrade Krone, Young Communists of Illinois’.
For the next two days he was taken around farms and factories so he could tell the American comrades about the wonderful Soviet system. On the last day he was given an audience with János Kádár, the Chairman of the Hungarian Communist Party. Afraid that they would discover his ruse, he decided to throw himself on the mercy of the Hungarian leader. ‘Comrade Kádár, I hope you like jokes’, he said. ‘You see, I’m not really a communist, I just said that so I could visit Hungary’.
When the translator relayed this to Kádár, he laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a communist either, I…
