It’s fashionable for writers from former Soviet block countries to portray themselves as dissidents. But is Ismail Kadare, the Albanian who recently won the international Man Booker Prize such a dissident? “Kadare is no Solzhenitsyn and never has been. If the head of the Union of Writers and the delegate to the People’s Assembly who studied in Moscow was the dissident, who in God’s name supported communism? His secretary? The janitor? His dissident credentials are rubbish, as are those of many Eastern European writers and poets who published and thrived during communism, mixing their literary career with commanding political posts.”