by Tony Judt
Shortly before Kostov’s execution the Hungarian Communists had staged a show trial of their would-be ‘Tito’, Communist Interior Minister László Rajk. The text was the same as in Bulgaria—literally so, with only the names changed. Accusations, details, confessions were all identical, which is not surprising since both trials were scripted in Moscow. Rajk himself was no innocent; as Communist Interior Minister he had sent many others to prison and worse. But in his case the indictment took particular care to emphasize his ‘traitorous work’ as ‘a paid agent of a foreign power’; the Soviet occupation was especially unpopular in Hungary and Moscow did not want to run the risk of turning Rajk into a hero of ‘national Communism’.
In the event there was no such danger. Rajk duly spoke his lines, acknowledging his service as an Anglo-American agent working to bring down Communism in Hungary, informing the Court that his real name was Reich (and thus of German, not Hungarian origin), and that he had been recruited in 1946 by Yugoslav intelligence who threatened to expose his wartime collaboration with the Hungarian Nazis ‘if I did not carry out all of their wishes.’ The proceedings of the Tribunal trying Rajk and his fellow ‘conspirators’, including Rajk’s own confession of September 16th 1949, were broadcast live by Radio Budapest. The pre-determined verdict was announced on September 24th; Rajk and two others were condemned to death. The executions, by hanging, were carried out on October 15th.
The public trials of Rajk and Kostov were only the tip of an iceberg of secret trials and tribunals set off by the hunt for Titoists in the Communist parties and governments of the region. The worst affected were the ‘southern tier’ of Communist states closest to Yugoslavia: Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Hungary. In Hungary alone—where Stalin’s fear of creeping Titoism was marginally more credible given the proximity of Yugoslavia, the large Hungarian minority in the Vojvodina region of Serbia, and the close alignment of Hungarian and Yugoslav foreign policy during 1947—some 2,000 Communist cadres were summarily executed, a further 150,000 sentenced to terms of imprisonment and about 350,000 expelled from the Party (which frequently meant loss of jobs, apartments, privileges and the right to higher education).
The persecutions in Poland and East Germany, while they put thousands of men and women in prison, did not result in any major show trials. There was a candidate in Poland for the role of Tito-Kostov-Rajk: Władisław Gomułka, Secretary General of the Polish United Workers Party and Vice-President of the Polish Council of Ministers. Gomułka had openly criticized plans for land collectivization in Poland and was publicly associated with talk of a Polish ‘national path’ to socialism. Indeed, he had been criticized for this by loyal Stalinists in the Polish party, and in August 1948 he was replaced as General Secretary by Bolesław Bierut. Five months later he resigned from his ministerial post, in November 1949 he was expelled from the Party and that December Bierut publicly accused Gomułka and his ‘group’ of nationalism and Titoism.
Reduced to the post of administrator for Social Assurance in Warsaw, Gomułka was finally arrested in July 1951 and only released in September 1954. Yet he was not harmed and there was no Titoism trial in Warsaw. There were trials in Poland—one of them, in which a group of officers was charged with anti-state plotting, began on the day of Gomułka’s arrest in 1951. And in a scheme devised by the secret services in Moscow, Gomułka was to have been linked to Rajk, Tito et al. via a complex network of real or invented contacts centering on an American, Noel Field, director of the Unitarian Church’s relief efforts in post-war Europe. Based in Budapest, Field’s imaginary network of master spies and Titoists had already been invoked in the charges against Rajk and others and was to have been the main evidence against Gomułka.
But the Poles were able to resist Soviet pressure to conduct full-scale public witch-hunts on the Hungarian model. The decimation of the exiled Polish Communist Party, at Stalin’s hands in Moscow ten years earlier, had given Bierut a foretaste of his own probable fate if Poland too entered the vortex of arrests, purges and trials. The Poles were fortunate in their timing too: delays in preparing the dossier on Gomułka—he had refused to break under interrogation or sign a fabricated confession—meant that Stalin died and his henchman Beria was killed before a Polish trial could be mounted. Finally, some Soviet leaders undoubtedly judged it imprudent in these early years to tear the Polish Communist leadership apart in full public view.
No such inhibitions applied in Czechoslovakia, however, where the biggest show trial of them all was to be staged in Prague in November 1952. A major Czech show trial had been planned from 1950, in the immediate wake of the Rajk and Kostov purges. But by the time it was finally mounted, the emphasis had shifted. Tito was still the enemy and accusations of espionage for the West still figured prominently in the indictments. But of the fourteen defendants at the ‘Trial of the Leadership of the Anti-State Conspiracy Centre’, eleven were Jews. On the very first page of the charge sheet it was made abundantly clear that this was no accident. The ‘Trotskyite-Titoite bourgeois-nationalist traitors and enemies of the Czechoslovak people’ were also, and above all, ‘Zionists’.
Stalin was an anti-Semite and always had been. But until the Second World War his dislike for Jews was so comfortably embedded in his destruction of other categories of person—Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, Left- and Right-deviationists, intellectuals, bourgeois and so on—that their Jewish origin seemed almost incidental to their fate. In any case, it was a matter of dogma that Communism had no truck with racial or religious prejudice; and once the Soviet cause was attached to the banner of ‘anti-Fascism’, as it was from 1935 until August 1939 and again from June 1941, the Jews of Europe had no greater friend than Josef Stalin himself.
That last claim is only partly ironic. The European Communist parties, especially those of central and eastern Europe, counted significant numbers of Jews among their members. The Jews of inter-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania were an oppressed and disliked minority. Young, secular Jews had few political options: Zionism, Bundism54, Social Democracy (where it was legal) or Communism. As the most uncompromisingly anti-national and ambitious of these, Communism had a distinctive appeal. Whatever its passing defects, the Soviet Union offered a revolutionary alternative at a time when central and eastern Europe appeared to be facing a choice between an authoritarian past and a Fascist future.
The appeal of the USSR was further accentuated by the experience of war. Jews who found themselves in Soviet-occupied Poland after the Germans attacked in 1939 were frequently deported eastwards and many died of disease and hardship. But they were not systematically exterminated. The advance of the Red Army through Ukraine and Byelorussia into the Baltic States, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany saved the remaining Jews in these lands. It was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz. Stalin most certainly did not fight the Second World War for the Jews; but had Hitler won—had the Germans and their collaborators remained in control of the territories they had captured up to the Battle of Stalingrad—millions more Jews would have been exterminated.
When the Communist parties took over in eastern Europe, many of their leading cadres were of Jewish origin. This was particularly marked at the level just below the top: the Communist police chiefs in Poland and Hungary were Jewish, as were economic policy makers, administrative secretaries, prominent journalists and Party theorists. In Hungary the Party leader (Mátyás Rákosi) was Jewish; in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland the Party leader was not Jewish but most of the core leadership group were. Jewish Communists throughout the Soviet bloc owed everything to Stalin. They were not much welcome in the countries to which they had returned, often after long exile: neither as Communists nor as Jews. Experience of war and occupation had made the local populations even more resentful of the Jews than before (‘Why have you come back?’ one neighbor asked Heda Margolius when she escaped from the Auschwitz death march and made her way back to Prague at the very end of the war55); the eastern European Jewish Communists co
uld be counted on, more perhaps than anyone else, to do Stalin’s bidding.
In the first post-war years Stalin displayed no hostility to his Jewish subordinates. At the United Nations the Soviet Union was an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist project, favoring the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East as an impediment to British imperial ambitions. At home Stalin had looked favorably on the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, formed during the war to mobilize Jewish opinion in the USSR and (especially) abroad behind the Soviet struggle against the Nazis. Soviet Jews, like many others under Moscow’s rule, fondly supposed that the more ecumenical mood of the war years, when Stalin sought and accepted help from any likely quarter, would translate into easier times after victory.
In fact, the opposite happened. Before the war had even ended Stalin, as we have seen, was exiling whole nations to the east and doubtless harbored similar plans for the Jews. As in central Europe, so in the lands of the Soviet Union: even though Jews had lost more than anyone else, it was easy and familiar to blame those same Jews for everyone else’s sufferings. The wartime invocation of the banner of Russian nationalism brought Soviet rhetoric a lot closer to the Slavexclusivist language of old-time Russian anti-Semites; this was certainly not to the regime’s disadvantage. For Stalin himself it represented a return to familiar territory, his own anti-Jewish instincts underscored by his observation of Hitler’s successful exploitation of popular anti-Semitism.
For various reasons it had always suited the Soviet purpose to downplay the distinctively racist character of Nazi brutality: the massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar was officially commemorated as the ‘murder of peaceful Soviet citizens’, just as the post-war memorial at Auschwitz confined itself to general references to ‘victims of Fascism’. Racism had no place in the Marxist lexicon; dead Jews were posthumously assimilated into the same local communities that had so disliked them when they were alive. But now the presumptively cosmopolitan qualities of Jews—the international links from which Stalin had hoped to benefit in the dark months following the German attack—began once more to be held against them as the battle lines of the Cold War settled into place and international wartime contacts and communications became in Stalin’s eyes a retroactive liability.
The first victims were the Jewish leaders of the wartime Anti-Fascist Committeeitself. Solomon Mikhoels, its prime mover and a major figure in Russia’s Yiddish Theatre, was murdered on January 12th 1948. The arrival in Moscow of Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir on September 11th 1948 was the occasion for spontaneous outbursts of Jewish enthusiasm, with street demonstrations on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and chants of ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ outside the Israeli legation. This would have been provocative and unacceptable to Stalin at any time. But he was rapidly losing his enthusiasm for the new State of Israel: whatever its vaguely socialist proclivities it clearly had no intention of becoming a Soviet ally in the region; worse, the Jewish state was demonstrating alarmingly pro-American sensibilities at a sensitive moment. The Berlin blockade had just begun and the Soviet split with Tito was entering its acute phase.
On September 21st 1948 Pravda published an article by Ilya Ehrenburg indicating clearly the change of line on Zionism. From January 1949 articles began to appear in Pravda attacking ‘cosmopolitans without a fatherland’, ‘unpatriotic groups of theater critics’, ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, ‘persons without identity’ and ‘passportless wanderers’. Yiddish schools and theatres were shut down, Yiddish newspapers banned and libraries closed. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee itself had been suppressed on November 20th 1948. Its remaining leaders, artists, writers and government functionaries were arrested the following month and kept in prison for three years. Pressured under torture to confess to an ‘anti-Soviet’ conspiracy, they were clearly being prepared for a show trial.
The security forces colonel who conducted the investigation, Vladimir Komarov, sought to broaden the charges out to encompass a large-scale Jewish conspiracy against the USSR directed from Washington and Tel Aviv. As he put it to Solomon Lozovsky, one of the prisoners: ‘Jews are low, dirty people, all Jews are lousy bastards, all opposition to the Party consists of Jews, Jews all over the Soviet Union are conducting an anti-Soviet whispering campaign. Jews want to annihilate all Russians. ’56 Such overt anti-Semitism might have been embarrassing even to Stalin, however; in the end the fifteen defendants (all Jewish) were secretly tried in the summer of 1952 by a Military Tribunal. All but one were executed; the sole survivor, Lina Shtern, received ten years in prison.
Meanwhile the anti-Semitic tide was gathering strength in the satellite states. In Romania, where a substantial part of the Jewish population had survived the war, an anti-Zionist campaign was launched in the autumn of 1948 and sustained with varying degrees of energy for the next six years. But the size of the Romanian Jewish community and its links to the United States inhibited direct attacks on it; indeedthe Romanians for some time toyed with the idea of letting their Jews leave—applications for visas were allowed from the spring of 1950 and not halted until April 1952, by which time 90,000 Romanian Jews had left for Israel alone.
Plans for a show trial in Romania centred on the (non-Jewish) Romanian Communist leader Lucretius Pătrăşcanu. Pătrăşcanu’s publicly voiced doubts over rural collectivization made him a natural candidate for a Romanian ‘Rajk trial’ based on charges of pro-Titoism, and he was arrested in April 1948. But by the time his interrogators were ready to bring him to trial the goalposts had moved and Pătrăşcanu’s case was bundled with that of Ana Pauker. Pauker was Jewish; the daughter of a Jewish shochet (a ritual slaughterer) from Moldavia she was the first Jewish government minister in Romania’s history (and the first female foreign minister anywhere in the world). She was also a notorious hard-liner in doctrinal and policy matters, which made her an exemplary target for a Romanian leadership trying to curry favor with the local population.
Stalin’s death aborted the plans of Romanian Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej to stage a show trial of Pauker and others. Instead, during 1953 and early ’54, the Romanian Party conducted a series of secret trials of lesser fry accused of being Zionist spies in the pay of ‘imperial agents’. Victims ranging from genuine members of the (right-wing) Revisionist Zionists to Jewish Communists tarred with the Zionist brush were accused of illegal relations with Israel and of collaborating with Nazis during the war. They were sentenced to prison for periods varying from ten years to life. Finally Pătrăşcanu himself was tried in April 1954, after languishing in prison for six years; charged with spying for the British, he was found guilty and executed.
Pauker was more fortunate: protected by Moscow (first by Stalin, later by Molotov) she was never directly targeted as a ‘Zionist’, and survived her September 1952 expulsion from the Party, disappearing into obscurity until her death in 1960. The Romanian Communist Party, smaller and more isolated than any of the other east European parties, had always been rent by infighting, and the defeat of the ‘rightist’ Pătrăşcanu and the ‘leftist’ Pauker was above all a factional victory for the viciously effective dictator Gheorghiu-Dej, whose governing style (like that of his successor Nicolae Ceauşescu) was morbidly reminiscent of old-style authoritarian rule in the Balkans.
Jews were purged from Romanian party and government posts in these years, as they were in East Germany and Poland, two other countries where one faction of the Party could mobilize popular anti-Jewish sentiment against the Party’s own ‘cosmopolitans’. East Germany was especially fertile territory. In January 1953, as the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was unfolding in Moscow, prominent East German Jews and Jewish Communists fled west. One member of the East German Central Committee, Hans Jendretsky, demanded that Jews—‘enemies of the state’—be excluded from public life. But by luck, by timing or out of prudence, all three states avoided a full-scale anti-Semitic show trial of the kind planned in Moscow and carried through in Prague.
The Slánský Trial, as it became known, is the classic
Communist show trial. It was meticulously prepared over three years. First to be ‘investigated’ were a group of Slovak Communist leaders, notably the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Vladimír Clementis, arrested in 1950 and accused of ‘bourgeois nationalism’. To them were added various mid-level Czech Communists, accused with the Slovaks of having taken part in a Titoist-Trotskyist conspiracy along lines familiar from the Rajk case. But none of those implicated and held in prison during 1950 and 1951 was senior enough to serve as figurehead and ringleader for the major public trial that Stalin was demanding.
In the spring of 1951 Soviet Police Chief Beria instructed the Czechs to shift the emphasis of their investigations from a Titoist to a Zionist plot. From now on the whole enterprise was in the hands of the Soviet secret services—Colonel Komarov and another officer were sent to Prague to take the investigations in hand, and the Czech security police and Communist leadership received their orders from them. The need for a prominent victim had focused Soviet attention on the second figure in the Czech hierarchy after President Klement Gottwald: Party General Secretary Rudolf Slánský. Unlike Gottwald, who was a serviceable figurehead and pliable Party loyalist, Slánský, though eminently Stalinist (like Rajk before him), was a Jew.