As a 10-year-old young ‘pioneer’ in communist-controlled Hungary, I hated the red kerchief I was forced to wear under threat of my family’s safety. Every youngster was a ‘pioneer’ – the pathetic but compulsory version of Britain’s volunteer boy scouts – and the red kerchief, torn from the red flag of communist dictatorship, was enforced.

That this was symbolic of communism’s need to enforce its freedom-crushing ideology on often unwilling citizens (from an early age) was obvious even to me at the time.