by Tony Judt
At first Gottwald was reluctant to have Slánský arrested—the two of them had worked closely together in purging their colleagues over the past three years and if the General Secretary was implicated, Gottwald himself might be next. But the Soviets insisted, presenting forged evidence linking Slánský to the CIA, and Gottwald gave way. On November 23rd 1951 Slánský was arrested; in the days that followed prominent Jewish Communists still at liberty followed him into prison. The security services now set themselves the task of extracting confessions and ‘evidence’ from their many prisoners in order to construct a major case against Slánský and his collaborators. Thanks to a certain amount of resistance by their victims (notably the former General Secretary himself) even in the face of barbaric torture, this task took them the best part of a year.
Finally, by September 1952, the indictment was completed. The text of the confessions, the indictment, the predetermined sentences and the script of the trial were then sent to Moscow for Stalin’s personal approval. Back in Prague a ‘dress rehearsal’ of the full trial was conducted—and tape-recorded. This was to provide an alternative text for ‘live transmission’ in the unlikely event that one of the defendants retracted his confession in open court, like Kostov. It was not needed.
The trial lasted from November 20th to November 27th 1952. It followed well-established precedent: the accused were charged with having done and said things they had not (on the basis of confessions extracted by force from other witnesses, including their fellow defendants); they were blamed for things that they had done but to which new meanings were attached (thus three of the accused men were charged with having favored Israel in trade deals, at a time when this was still Soviet policy); and prosecutors charged Clementis with having met with Tito (‘the executioner-of-the-Yugoslav-people and lackey-of-imperialism Tito’)—at a time when Clementis was Czechoslovakia’s Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs and Tito was still in Soviet good graces.
Two characteristics marked this trial out from all those preceding it. Prosecutors and witnesses repeatedly emphasized the Jewishness of most of the accused—‘the cosmopolitan Rudolf Margolius’, ‘Slánský . . . the great hope of all the Jews in the Communist Party’, ‘representatives of international Zionism’, etc. ‘Jewish origin’ (sometimes ‘Zionist origin’) served as a presumption of guilt, of anti-Communist, anti-Czech intentions. And the language of the prosecutors, broadcast over Czechoslovak radio, harked back to and even improved upon the crude vituperation of Prosecutor Vyshinsky in the Moscow Trials: ‘repulsive traitors’, ‘dogs’, ‘wolves’, ‘wolfish successors of Hitler’ and more in the same vein. It was also recapitulated in the Czech press.
On the fourth day of the trial the Prague Communist daily Rudé Právo editorialized thus: ‘One trembles with disgust and repulsion at the sight of these cold, unfeeling beings. The Judas Slánský’, the paper continued, was betting on ‘these alien elements, this rabble with its shady past.’ No Czech, the writer explained, could have committed such crimes: ‘only cynical Zionists, without a fatherland . . . clever cosmopolitans who have sold out to the dollar. They were guided in this criminal activity by Zionism, bourgeois Jewish nationalism, racial chauvinism.’
Eleven of the fourteen accused were sentenced to death and executed, three were condemned to life imprisonment. Addressing the National Conference of the Czechoslovak Communist Party a month later, Gottwald had this to say about his former comrades: ‘Normally bankers, industrialists, former kulaks don’t get into our Party. But if they were of Jewish origin and Zionist orientation, little attention among us was paid to their class origins. This state of affairs arose from our repulsion at anti-Semitism and our respect for the suffering of the Jews.’
The Slánský trial was a criminal masquerade, judicial murder as public theatre. 57 Like the trial of the Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow which preceded them, the Prague proceedings were also intended as an overture to the arrest of the Soviet Jewish doctors whose ‘plot’ was announced by Pravda on January 13th 1953. These Jewish physicians—‘a Zionist terrorist gang’ accused of murdering Andrei Zdanov, conspiring with the ‘Anglo-American bourgeoisie’, and advancing the cause of ‘Jewish nationalism’ in connivance with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (as well as the late ‘bourgeois Jewish nationalist’ Solomon Mikhoels)—were to go on trial within three months of the Slánský verdicts.
Indications are that this trial in its turn was envisaged by the Kremlin as a preamble and excuse for mass round-ups of Soviet Jews and their subsequent expulsion to Birobidzhan (the ‘homeland’ in the east assigned to Jews) and Soviet Central Asia, where many Polish Jews had previously been sent between 1939 and 1941: the MVD publishing house had printed and prepared for distribution one million copies of a pamphlet explaining ‘Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country.’ But even Stalin appears to have hesitated (Ilya Ehrenburg warned him of the devastating impact a show trial of the Jewish doctors would have upon Western opinion); in any case, before he could make a decision he died, on March 5th 1953.
Stalin’s prejudices do not require an explanation: in Russia and Eastern Europe anti-Semitism was its own reward. Of greater interest are Stalin’s purposes in mounting the whole charade of purges, indictments, confessions and trials. Why, after all, did the Soviet dictator need trials at all? Moscow was in a position to eliminate anyone it wished, anywhere in the Soviet bloc, through ‘administrative procedures’, Trials might seem counter-productive; the obviously false testimonies and confessions, the unembarrassed targeting of selected individuals and social categories, were hardly calculated to convince foreign observers of the bona fides of Soviet judicial procedures.
But the show trials in the Communist bloc were not about justice. They were, rather, a form of public pedagogy-by-example; a venerable Communist institution (the first such trials in the USSR dated to 1928) whose purpose was to illustrate and exemplify the structures of authority in the Soviet system. They told the public who was right, who wrong; they placed blame for policy failures; they assigned credit for loyalty and subservience; they even wrote a script, an approved vocabulary for use in discussion of public affairs. Following his arrest Rudolf Slánský was only ever referred to as ‘the spy Slánský’, this ritual naming serving as a form of political exorcism.58
Show trials—or tribunals, in the language of Vyshinsky’s 1936 Soviet Manual of Criminal Investigation—were explicitly undertaken for the ‘mobilisation of proletarian public opinion’. As the Czechoslovak ‘Court Organisation Act’ of January 1953 baldly summed it up, the function of the courts was ‘to educate the citizens in devotionand loyalty toward the Czechoslovak Republic, etc.’ Robert Vogeler, a defendant at a Budapest trial in 1948, noted at the time: ‘To judge from the way our scripts were written, it was more important to establish our allegorical identities than it was to establish our “guilt”. Each of us, in his testimony, was obliged to “unmask” himself for the benefit of the Cominform Press and the radio.’
The accused were reduced from presumptive political critics or opponents to a gaggle of unprincipled conspirators, their purposes venal and traitorous. The clumsiness of Soviet imperial style sometimes masks this objective—what is one to make of a rhetoric designed to mobilize public opinion in metropolitan Budapest by reiterating the errors of those who opposed ‘the struggle against the kulaks’? But the ‘public’ were not being asked to believe what they heard; they were merely being trained to repeat it.
One use of the public trials was to identify scapegoats. If Communist economic policy was not producing its pre-announced successes, if Soviet foreign policy was blocked or forced to compromise, someone must take the blame. How else were the mis-steps of the infallible Leader to be explained? There were many candidates: Slánský was widely disliked inside and outside the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Rajk had been a harsh Stalinist interior minister. And precisely because they had carried out unpopular policies now seen to have failed, any and a
ll Communist leaders and ministers were potential victims in waiting. Just as defeated generals in the French Revolutionary wars were frequently charged with treason, so Communist ministers confessed to sabotage when the policies they had implemented failed—often literally—to deliver the goods.
The advantage of the confession, in addition to its symbolic use as an exercise in guilt-transferal, was that it confirmed Communist doctrine. There were no disagreements in Stalin’s universe, only heresies; no critics, only enemies; no errors, only crimes. The trials served both to illustrate Stalin’s virtues and identify his enemies’ crimes. They also illuminate the extent of Stalin’s paranoia and the culture of suspicion that surrounded him. One part of this was a deep-rooted anxiety about Russian, and more generally ‘Eastern’ inferiority, a fear of Western influence and the seduction of Western affluence. In a 1950 trial in Sofia of ‘The American Spies in Bulgaria’, the accused were charged with propagating the view ‘that the chosen races live only in the West, in spite of the fact that geographically they have all started from the East’. The indictment went on to describe the accused as exhibiting ‘a feeling for servile under-valuation’ that Western spies had successfully exploited.
The West, then, was a threat that had to be exorcised, repeatedly. There were Western spies, of course: real ones. In the early 1950s, following the outbreak of war in Korea, Washington did consider the possibility of destabilizing eastern Europe and US intelligence made a number of unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Soviet bloc, lending superficial verisimilitude to the confessions of Communists who had purportedly worked with the CIA or spied for the British Secret Service. And Stalin in his last years seems genuinely to have expected a war; as he explained in an ‘interview’ in Pravda in February 1951, a confrontation between capitalism and communism was inevitable, and now increasingly likely. From 1947 through 1952 the Soviet bloc was on a permanent war footing: arms production in Czechoslovakia increased seven-fold between 1948 and 1953, while more Soviet troops were moved to the GDR and plans for a strategic bomber force drawn up.
Thus the arrests and purges and trials were a public reminder of the coming confrontation; a justification for Soviet war fears; and a strategy (familiar from earlier decades) for slimming down the Leninist party and preparing it for combat. The 1949 charge that Rajk had conspired with the US and Britain to overthrow the Communists seemed believable to many Communists and their sympathizers in the West. Even the otherwise outré accusations against Slánský et al. drew on the widely recognized truth that Czechoslovakia had many more links with the West than other states in the bloc. But why Rajk? Why Slánský? How were the scapegoats chosen?
In Stalin’s eyes any Communist who had spent time in the West, out of Soviet reach, was to be regarded with suspicion—whatever he or she was doing there. Communists who had been active in Spain during the Civil War of the thirties—and there had been many from Eastern Europe and Germany—were the first to fall under suspicion. Thus László Rajk had served in Spain (as a political commissar of the ‘Rákosi battalion’); so had Otto Sling, one of Slánský’s co-defendants. Following Franco’s victory, many of the Spanish veterans had escaped into France, where they ended up in French internment camps. From there a significant number of them had joined the French Resistance, where they teamed up with German and other foreign Communists who had taken refuge in France. There were enough such men and women for the French Communist Party to have organized them into a sub-section of the Communist underground, the Main d’Oeuvre Immigré (MOI). Prominent post-war Communists like Artur London (another Slánský trial defendant) made many Western contacts through their wartime work in the MOI and this, too, aroused Stalin’s suspicions and was later held against them.
The wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR had been instructed to make Western contacts and document Nazi atrocities—the very activities that later formed the basis of the criminal charges against them. German Communists like Paul Merker who spent the war years in Mexico; Slovak Communists like the future Foreign Minister Clementis who worked in London; anyone who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe: all were vulnerable to accusations that they had contacted Western agents or worked too closely with non-Communist resisters. Josef Frank, a Czech Communist who survived imprisonment at Buchenwald, was charged at the Slánský trial with using his time in the camp to make suspect acquaintances, ‘class enemies’.
The only Communists who were not prima facie objects of Stalin’s misgivings were those who had spent long periods of time in Moscow, under Kremlin scrutiny. These could be counted on twice over: having spent many years in full view of the Soviet authorities they had few if any foreign contacts; and if they had survived the purges of the thirties (in which most of the exiled leadership of the Polish, Yugoslav and other Communist parties had been eliminated) they could be counted on to obey the Soviet dictator without question. ‘National’ Communists on the other hand, men and women who had remained on home soil, were deemed unreliable. They usually had a more heroic track record in domestic resistance than their Moscow confrères, who had returned after the war courtesy of the Red Army, and thus a more popular local image. And they were prone to form their own views on a local or national ‘road to Socialism’.
For these reasons the ‘national’ Communists were almost always the main victims of the post-war show trials. Thus Rajk was a ‘national’ Communist, whereas Rákosi and Gerö—the Hungarian Party leaders who stage-managed his trial—were ‘Muscovites’ (though Gerö had also been active in Spain). There was little else to distinguish them. In Czechoslovakia, the men who had organized the Slovak national uprising against the Nazis (including Slánský) were ready-made victims of Soviet suspicion; Stalin did not enjoy sharing the credit for Czechoslovakia’s liberation. The Kremlin preferred reliable, unheroic, unimaginative ‘Muscovites’ whom it knew: men like Klement Gottwald.
Traicho Kostov had led the Bulgarian Communist partisans during the war, until his arrest; after the war he took second place to Georgii Dimitrov, newly returned from Moscow, until his wartime record was turned against him in 1949. In Poland Gomułka had organized armed resistance under the Nazis, together with Marian Spychalski; after the war Stalin favored Bierut and other Moscow-based Poles. Spychalski and Gomułka were both later arrested and, as we have seen, narrowly avoided starring in their own show trial.
There were exceptions. In Romania it was one ‘national’ Communist, Dej, who engineered the downfall of another ‘national’ Communist, Pătrăşcanu, as well as the eclipse of the impeccably Muscovite and Stalinist Ana Pauker. And even Kostov had spent the early thirties in Moscow, at the Comintern’s Balkan desk. He was also a well-attested critic of Tito (although for his own reasons: Kostov saw in Tito the heir to Serbian territorial ambitions at Bulgarian expense). Far from saving him, however, this just exacerbated his crime—Stalin was not interested in agreement or even consent, only unswerving obedience.
Lastly, there was a considerable element of personal score-settling and cynical instrumentalism in the selection of trial victims and the charges against them. As Karol Bacílek explained to the National Conference of the Czech Communist Party on December 17th 1952, ‘The question as to who is guilty and who is innocent will in the end be decided upon by the Party with the help of the National Security Organs. ’ In some instances the latter fabricated cases against people out of coincidence or fantasy; in others they deliberately claimed the opposite of what they knew to be the case. Thus two of the defendants in the Slánský trial were accused of over-billing Moscow for Czech products. Typically, goods made in the satellite states were deliberately under-priced to Soviet advantage; only Moscow could authorize exceptions. The ‘over-billing’ in the Czech case, however, was established Soviet practice, as the prosecutors well knew: a way of funneling cash through Prague and on to the West, for use in intelligence operations.
Similarly cynical—and part of a campaign of personal vilification—was the charge against Ana Pauker,
who was accused of Rightist and Leftist ‘deviationism’ simultaneously: first she had been ‘critical’ of rural collectivization, then she forced peasants to collectivize against their will. Rajk was accused of dissolving the Communist Party’s network within the Hungarian police in 1947; in fact he had done this (on the eve of the 1947 elections and with official approval) as a cover for the dissolution of the far stronger Social Democratic police organization. Later he had secretly re-established the Communist network while maintaining the ban on other parties. But his actions, impeccably orthodox at the time, were grist to the Soviet mill when the time came to remove him.
The defendants at the major show trials were all Communists. Other Communists were purged without public trials or without any judicial process at all. But the overwhelming majority of Stalin’s victims, in the Soviet Union and the satellite states, were of course not Communists at all. In Czechoslovakia, in the years 1948-54, Communists represented just one-tenth of 1 percent of those condemned to prison terms or work camps, one in twenty of those condemned to death. In the GDR the Stasi was created on February 8th 1950, with the task of overseeing and controlling not just Communists but the whole of society. Stalin was routinely suspicious not only of Communists with contacts or experience in the West, but of anyone who had lived outside the Soviet bloc.
It thus went without saying that virtually the entire population of eastern Europe fell under Kremlin suspicion in those years. Not that the post-war repression within the Soviet Union was any less all-embracing: just as Russians’ exposure to Western influence in the years 1813-15 was believed to have paved the way for the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, so Stalin feared contamination and protest as a result of wartime contacts in his own day. Any Soviet citizen or soldier who survived Nazi occupation or imprisonment was thus an object of suspicion. When the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet passed a law in 1949, punishing soldiers who committed rape with 10 to 15 years in a labour camp, disapproval of the Red Army’s rampage across eastern Germany and Austria was the least of its concerns. The real motive was to fashion a device with which to punish returning Soviet soldiers at will.