Journey 4: Györ to Prague

Chapter 54: Sex, Sleeper Trains and the Revolutions of 1968

It’s journey four in A History of Europe in 75 Train Journeys and we’re crossing Eastern Europe at the start of the 21st century…

GYÖR, AUGUST 2002

Does sex happen on sleeper trains?

I mean, you’ve got a group of strangers brought together for a single night (often sharing small compartments) who will separate the next morning, never to see each other again. You’d expect them to be rampant, at least in popular culture. But it doesn’t seem to be that way.

There’s a bit of (somewhat exploitative) sex in Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train. Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar involves dozens of sleeper trains with sex constantly in the background, but generally consummated in the cities, not on the trains. James Bond, obviously, has sex on a sleeper train, but where doesn’t he?

In general, there’s very little sex on sleepers.

Personally, I blame Agatha Christie. She defined how we perceive sleeper trains, and no-one ever has sex in an Agatha Christie novel.

The result is that a sleeper train becomes more like a student dorm: a sense that everyone else might be having sex, but no one actually is.

I can’t remember where, but I do remember reading a wonderful (true) story about a chap who was travelling home on the Scottish sleeper and made a new friend in the lounge car. He went back to her compartment, where he spent the night. The next morning, he went to return to his own compartment to reclaim his possessions (and generally make himself presentable) prior to being met by his wife at Pitlochry station, only to discover that his new travelling companion was going to Aberdeen and the train had divided in the night. His bag (and his alibi) were now fifty miles away. I’ve often wondered how he got out of that one.

It’s certainly a long time since I had sex on a sleeper train. My first sleeper train ride with my then girlfriend, now wife, was aged nineteen for our first anniversary together. Like the unfortunate adulterer in the previous paragraph, we also went to Scotland. Unlike him, we had always planned to share a cabin. I won’t comment further.

Pretty quickly we graduated to European sleeper trains, where we’d either be sharing a couchette with a bunch of other Europeans or - a decade or so later - with our own children.

A European Couhette compartment typical of those we usually travelled in. Photo by Matthew Black

The only European train on which I remember having sex was in Slovakia, and it wasn’t a sleeper train. We’d been to Rome, Innsbruck and Budapest and were now travelling from Györ in Western Hungary to Prague. It was a terrifically exciting journey.

This was our first trip in Eastern Europe. It was only just over a decade since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Countries like Hungary and Czechia were not yet in the European Union. They felt half-forbidden, unfamiliar, still shadowed by the Cold War. It may have been this excitement that prompted our ill-advised interest in joining the metre-high club. We had just crossed the border from Hungary to Slovakia, and now had a good few hours before more heavy-toed boots would stomp towards our compartment for the next border crossing.

We surreptitiously slipped to the toilet at the end of the carriage. Having tried it, I wouldn’t recommend sex in a train toilet - however adventurous you’re feeling.

But - surreally - it seems to have been a lack of sex that kicked off the wave of revolutionary activity that roiled Europe in 1968.

The tinder box of sexual frustration was Nanterre, in the Paris suburbs. If that name sounds familiar to you, it is probably because rioting would again break out in Nanterre in 2023, sparked by a police killing and a pervasive sense of economic and racial injustice.

In 1968, the issue was that boys weren’t allowed into the girls’ dorms. It all kicked off when the French Minister for Youth visited Nanterre to open a new sports facility. A student radical asked what he was doing to “address the sexual problems” (i.e. allow boys and girls into each other’s dorms). The minister suggested that a swim in the pool could be the solution as a way of cooling the boys’ ardour. “That is what the Hitler Youth used to say", was the student’s hyperbolic reply.

Sex as a motivation for rioting was common across Europe in 1968. German student radicals would contrast their advocacy of free love with Hitler’s sexual neuroses to highlight their opposition to fascism.

What started as protests about sex in Nanterre soon became a full-scale student uprising, spreading across Paris and beyond. In self-conscious echoes of previous French revolutions, students formed barricades and sought to take control of the streets.

Similar protests of differing levels of intensity occurred in universities throughout Europe, with Italy and Germany both consumed.

The American conflict in Vietnam was a powerful motivator for student protest, with the United States being seen as a resurgence of fascism or imperialism - or both. The fact that Western European Governments were both allied to, and defended by, the United States resulted in national Governments being seen - by extension - as the agents of imperialism - or worse.

Protests on campuses turned into strikes and protests. The “May Events” in France saw strikes in all major industries; the largest in French history. Italy was consumed by strikes from late 1968 right through 1969. Frequently, students and workers wanted different things.

For students, this was an exercise of power by the youthful baby boomer generation. The first self-identified teenagers were part of a huge demographic wave sweeping aside the old order. Deaths in the two world wars meant the generation of their parents was unusually small. As a result of a surge of postwar fertility, the baby boomer generation was unusually large. The postwar economic miracle had given teenagers disposable income for the first time in history, and their size meant goods were directly marketed to them. They were the first generation to experience consumerist entitlement.

Universities, by contrast, were still run on pretty traditional lines, with distant and aloof tutors… and single sex dorms. The student protests were a generational point being made.

Workers’ strikes had something in common: instead of distant and aloof dons, they were protesting at distant and aloof managers. While student numbers were higher in the 1960s than ever before, they were still low compared to what was to come. Most baby boomers were not students but many strikes were still sparked by the same sense of intergenerational entitlement. Young factory workers felt looked down on by managers who, in the words of Tony Judt in Postwar, “could discipline, humiliate and fire their staff at will”. As with students, workers wanted to be heard.

That was what happened in the West.

But the train journey we’re on is through the East - destination Prague. And things here were very different. Tony Judt also describes the visit of German student radical Rudi Dutschke to his counterparts in Prague. As he puts it, “local students were taken aback at his insistence that pluralist democracy was the real enemy. For them, it was the goal.”

1968 was the year of the “Prague Spring”, the year in which a resurgent hope that Eastern European Communism did not have to mean the same as dictatorship was snuffed out by Soviet tanks. Alexander Dubček, the leader of the Prague Spring, was also part of a generational changing of the guard.

Appointed First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist party on 5th January 1968, he was just 47 years old. A fervent Communist, he recognised that the Stalinist model of repression had not endeared itself with his compatriots. He was convinced that Communism could prove itself in a free marketplace of ideas, and set about dismantling the censorship, permitting free media and preparing the ground for elections.

His colleagues both in Moscow and across the Warsaw Pact were alarmed. They had a lot less confidence that Communism would earn its ruling status if forced to compete with other models. On May 4th, at the height of the Prague Spring, Dubček was summoned to Moscow to explain himself. He assured his Soviet masters that he was saving Communism, not harming it.

The Soviets were having none of it. On August 20th 1968, half a million Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. Dubček was left in power just long enough to unwind most of his own reforms, then removed in 1969.

The crushing of the Prague Spring wasn’t especially violent. The tanks were enough.

The reason for this was, to a large degree, the events that had happened in Hungary twelve years earlier. Our train ride from Hungary to Prague maps out that journey of disillusionment in Eastern European Communism.

The Hungarian story was similar to start with: a reform-minded Communist leader was appointed; in this case, Imre Nagy in July 1953. Within two years, Moscow realised that they didn’t want a reform-minded Communist leader in Hungary, and removed him.

Having had a taste of reform, however, young Hungarians weren’t going to be put back in their box. In October 1956, large student demonstrations broke out. Hoping to end the protests with a concession, Imre Nagy was restored on October 24th 1956.

With student councils and workers’ revolutionary committees forming all over the country, Nagy realised that repression would be catastrophic to the reputation of the Communist party. Instead, like Dubček in Prague twelve years later, he tried to enhance the standing of Communism by promising free elections and a multi-party democracy.

And Moscow reacted then as they would later: Soviet tanks attacked Budapest overnight on the morning of November 4th. Nagy was deposed and later executed. He made a last minute radio broadcast calling on Hungarians to resist the Soviet “invader”, and they did. By the time Moscow had full control, 2,700 Hungarians had died fighting, 341 had been executed, 22,000 had been imprisoned, 13,000 had been sent to internment camps and 200,000 had fled Hungary as refugees.

It’s no surprise that, having seen the Hungarian movie in 1956 and knowing how it ended, the Czechs sullenly succumbed to the crushing of the Prague Spring, as opposed to resisting and paying with their lives.

As citizens of Czechoslovakia were waking up to the unambiguous proven reality that Communism really was inescapable Soviet imperialism, student protestors in the West were gearing up for another year of demonstrations in favour of free love.

Fair enough. Helen and I emerge from the bathroom at the end of the carriage. We’re young and an illicit shag is important at that age. The boys in Nanterre thought the same.

We look out of the window.

We’re entering Bratislava, capital of Slovakia. Even in 2002, Bratislava looks grey. We would later discover it to be one of the most delightful capitals in Europe but from the train it looks grim, austere and foreboding. Back then, Slovakia was still poor: per capita national income was just 25% of the UK’s.

Railway locomotives in Bratislava. Photo by Kevin Prince

We cross the final border from Slovakia to Czechia. The Slovaks had wasted no time in claiming full independence once the Iron Curtain fell, so by 2002 it was a full international border. This was the only one of Dubček’s reforms to survive. Following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, Czechoslovakia had been formed from an unhappy marriage between the Czech majority and the Slovak minority. Dubċek was a Slovak. He was able to push through the creation of a Slovak Republic within Czechoslovakia, with Bratislava as its capital.

Otherwise, the Prague Spring was crushed, and with it the dreams of Eastern Europeans across the continent. But the Slovaks did at least gain the right to be repressed by Slovak Communists, not Czech ones. It’s not what Dubček hoped for, but it wasn’t nothing.

Our train rattles on toward Prague, tracing a line through decades of broken hope and failed reform. By 2002, the tanks are gone, the borders open and the beer cheap.

For the baby boomers of the West, 1968 was a declaration of freedom: flexing generational muscles would become a longstanding baby boomer habit. For the youth of the East, it was a reminder that freedom could still be taken away. Love, it turns out, wasn’t all you needed.

But sometimes - on a slow train through Central Europe, your partner beside you, the ghosts of history flickering past the window - it wasn’t a bad place to start. Even in the toilet of a Slovakian train.