Not trusting their Eastern European colleagues to get it right, Moscow sent Soviet secret police officers—Byelkin to Budapest and Alexander Beschasnov to Prague, where the local policemen had been resisting Soviet “advice” on this and other matters—to direct the investigations.40 They brought with them teams of advisers prepared to plan and orchestrate the trials. In Prague, Beschasnov and his group all lived together in a suburban villa, where they employed four full-time translators and sent regular reports to Stalin.41 In Budapest, the Hungarian investigators were accompanied at all times by Soviet mentors. When a Polish officer arrived from Warsaw to be briefed by the Hungarians on their “progress,” he was struck by the presence of a red-haired NKVD general, recently arrived from Moscow, who appeared to know a lot more than the Hungarians about “the real motivations of the whole affair,” even though he said nothing directly to the Poles during their stay.42
The identities of the arrestees and the nature of their alleged conspiracies also fell in line with Stalin’s own obsessions of the time. Though the rules were not ironclad, certain types of people were more likely to be arrested than others. Potential “right-deviationists” and “Titoists” like Gomułka were suspect. So were “left-deviationists,” also known as “cosmopolitans” or “Zionists”—in other words, Jews. As noted, this latter category of enemy had come to the forefront of Stalinist paranoia following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, after which Stalin launched a broad campaign against Soviet Jews. Jewish doctors—who were allegedly trying to kill or poison party leaders—would become one of the obsessions of his final years. In Eastern Europe, he may have had some more pragmatic motivations as well. He and his henchmen clearly believed, not without justification, that the persecution of Jewish communists would be welcomed by everyone else.
Communists who had spent the war away from Moscow, either at home or in Western Europe, were another target. Anyone with connections to foreign communist parties, anyone who had fought in the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and anyone with family connections outside their own country were also at risk of being named a left-deviationist or right-deviationist. Rajk had fought in Spain and spent the war in Budapest. Merker, a Jew who waited out the war in Mexico, was another obvious target. Gomułka had spent the war in Warsaw (which was when Bierut had been scheming against him: as early as June 1944 he had told the Comintern leadership that Gomułka was not qualified to be secretary of the communist party and had asked for Moscow’s help in replacing him).43
The Soviet scenario was not always followed with precision. Across the bloc, leaders also played for time, altered the orders, and arranged both arrests and trials in accordance with their own political needs. Gottwald delayed Slánský’s arrest until he himself was threatened. Gomułka’s trial was never held at all: although happy enough to arrest the popular party boss, Bierut never tortured him and never subjected him to a show trial, despite being under some pressure to do so. He may have feared that Gomułka would eventually emerge more popular, not less, from a show trial and he may have doubted whether his rival, in many ways the more confident figure, could be made to confess to imaginary crimes. Bierut may also have feared the long-term consquences of Gomułka’s destruction, just as Gottwald seems to have feared the long-term consequences of Slánský’s demise. Although neither man had any qualms about arresting and torturing priests or senior military officers, the murder of the general secretary of the communist party—the job held by both Gomułka and Slánský at the time—could be extremely dangerous for everyone else. Any one of them might come next, as one Hungarian historian notes: “When the ax was directed at the head of the party, the move triggered within the other party leaders … a defense mechanism, aimed at self-preservation.”44
In East Germany the leadership had other reasons for hesitation, and in fact senior German communists were at first largely spared when arrests began elsewhere in the bloc. At the time, the Allied Control Council still had a large presence in Germany, and events in Berlin were very much the focus of international news. Later on, after the official establishment of East Germany—the German Democratic Republic—a belated party purge began. A dozen-odd German communists were arrested, and several were eventually executed. But because both the Soviet and the East German leadership worried about how they would be received in West Germany, no public show trials were ever held. Aside from the possible bad publicity, the “success” of such trials depended on the creation and portrayal of a conspiracy, and there were too many German communists now residing in the West who would be able to pick apart a contrived “conspiracy” story and expose it as fiction.
Yet even countries that never held show trials did prepare for them, conducting arrests and interrogations under Soviet direction. As the investigations progressed, ever more international coordination was required. To be successful, Soviet secret policemen thought that show trials needed a complex story line, a conspiracy involving many actors, and so Soviet advisers pushed their Eastern European colleagues to link the traitors of Prague, Budapest, Berlin, and Warsaw into one story. In order to do so, they needed a central figure, someone who had known some of the protagonists and who could plausibly, or semi-plausibly, be accused of recruiting all of them. Eventually they hit on a man who fit these requirements: a mildly eccentric Harvard graduate and American State Department official named Noel Field.
In his lifetime, Field was notorious. Since then, he has been described as an American spy, as an agent, as a double agent, and as a provocateur sent by the CIA to cause havoc among the Eastern European communists.45 In his 1954 “rehabilitation” testimony—recently discovered by the Hungarian historian Mária Schmidt—Field declared himself, simply, to be a communist, working alongside the NKVD. A number of other documents now testify to that as well. Field wrote that he had been secretly working for the USSR since 1927, living an “illegal life completely separate from my official life,” and had been well acquainted with fellow members of the American communist party, among them Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers.46
Although he also knew Allen Dulles—a U.S. intelligence officer in Switzerland during the war and later the director of the CIA—and might even have had some dealings with him, there isn’t any evidence that Field ever became an American agent as Hungarian, Czech, and Polish prosecutors would allege. Nevertheless, from the Soviet point of view, Field was the perfect victim. He had left the State Department in 1936. He had spent the war in Geneva, working for the Unitarian Service Committee, an organization that offered assistance to refugees fleeing Hitler. Naturally, many of these refugees were communists and thus he had friends and acquaintances all across Eastern Europe.
Ironically, Field fell into Soviet hands because he wanted to capitalize on those friends and acquaintances. In the spring of 1949, Field was unemployed and afraid to return to the United States, where his name had already been mentioned during the public hearings on Alger Hiss. He traveled from East Berlin to Prague to Warsaw, apparently looking for a job, as the Unitarians were closing their Swiss office.47 He returned to Prague in May—and promptly disappeared. His wife, Herta, went to look for him, and in August she disappeared too. Field’s brother, Hermann, and his stepdaughter, Erica Wallach, also vanished, the former in Warsaw, the latter in East Berlin.
Field’s communist sympathies didn’t prevent Soviet and Eastern European prosecutors from weaving an elaborate web of theories around him and his family, or from inventing stories about him that bordered on the fantastical. Indeed, to do true justice to this bizarre piece of the Eastern European Stalinist story would require another book the size of this one. Suffice it to say that, after 1949, knowing Field or even having met him briefly was enough to incriminate anyone living in communist Europe, however high their rank and however excellent their connections. Even those who weren’t arrested fell under Field’s shadow. Jakub Berman, Poland’s ideology boss—second only to Bierut in the communist party hierarchy—lived under a cloud of su
spicion for years because his secretary, Anna Duracz, had once met Field briefly.
Field’s arrest in Budapest set off a rapid chain of events. His incarceration was quickly followed by the arrest and interrogation of Tibor Szőnyi, an anti-Nazi activist who had lived in Switzerland during the war and had known Field as well as Rajk. The Hungarian investigators were pleased because this implicated Rajk, along with dozens of others, by association. Eleven East Germans alleged to have known Field were arrested in Berlin in 1950, Merker among them. Two years later, when Slánský and thirteen associates confessed to Titoism, Zionism, treason, and conspiracy, they were also alleged to have been organized by the “well known agent” Noel Field.
Although he lay at the center of the case, Field never went on trial. But others confessed, in public and in great detail, that they had been guided by his evil hand. At his show trial, Szőnyi declared that Field and Dulles had persuaded him to impose a “chauvinistic and pro-American spirit” on the Hungarian diaspora in Switzerland.48 Rajk confessed that he, Field, and Tito had plotted the assassination of the Hungarian leadership. Béla Szász confessed to an absurd conspiracy involving a Danish nanny he had known slightly and an Englishman he had met once while in exile in Argentina. His guilt was proven by the fact that he had briefly passed through Switzerland during the war, even though he didn’t meet Field there and had never heard of him.49 Gejza Pavlik, a Czech arrested by the Hungarians in 1949, confessed that he had joined a vast Trotskyite movement organized by Field and the CIA, which was planning to insinuate itself into the leadership of the Czechoslovak communist party.50 In Prague, Slánský confessed that under the influence of Field he had “allowed hostile elements to penetrate the highest levels of the Central Committee” and had organized an “anti-state center” with the support of Freemasons, Zionists, and Titoists, among others. Otto Šling, a Czech regional party boss, confessed to working on behalf of the British secret service since the war. Bedřích Geminder, the head of the party’s international department, confessed that he was in touch with “Israeli diplomats.” That they really were diplomats, and not spies, hardly mattered. In a world in which Field was a criminal mastermind, any foreign consul, however junior, was a dangerous secret agent.51
Soviet advisers both wrote the scripts of these show trials and helped “persuade” victims to make the necessary confessions, using techniques they had tried before. The art of forcing confessions had already been honed to perfection in the Soviet system, where the “usual methods,” as one Czech report later put it, began with an “endless interrogation of the victim, with the officers working in shifts so that he or she received only a minimum of rest.” In addition to this there were “beatings, torture by hunger and thirst, confinement in the dark chamber, the inculcation of fear about the fate of the prisoner’s family, subtly staged confrontations, the use of stool pigeons, the bugging of cells, and many other refinements.”52 Most of the time, this kind of torture was referred to with euphemisms. Bierut and his sidekick Berman frequently ordered the police to create “such conditions that they tell the truth.”53 Czech interrogators were told that “these kinds of people are very obstinate and we cannot give them time to get ready for the trials.”54
The precise methods did vary from person to person and case to case. Szász was left standing for “seven times twenty-four hours,” and over the course of his imprisonment suffered five broken ribs. “Whether on instruction or simply for fun, they used me to relieve their boredom. They ordered me to stand motionless, then yelled at me or kicked the door, and on the pretext that I had moved, fell upon me and struck and kicked me all over …”55 Polish interrogation protocols contain records of guards who burned prisoners’ feet or hands, pulled their hair out, made them kneel with their arms in the air for hours, or forced them to stand on one leg for hours.56 General Spychalski was kept naked in a damp, dark, moldy cell.57 The Czech police beat a pregnant woman so badly that she miscarried. Another Czech woman, also pregnant, was made to sleep without clothes, mattress, or blankets for ten days. When she asked for a doctor, she was told that “it would be better if another beast like me would never be brought into the world.”58
Interrogations were also intended to “break” the victim psychologically. Prisoners were shown photographs of their spouses in prison, or were told that their children would suffer if they didn’t confess, or were persuaded to put their trust in a “kind” interrogator or an apparently sympathetic cellmate. In the case of the Eastern European communists, interrogators found it particularly effective to return again and again to the past. Incidents that had taken place decades earlier were rehashed over and over again. The suspect’s years in the underground were discussed at length, as were his wartime experiences. This obsession with the past was deliberate, as István Rév has brilliantly observed. After all, no one who had ever been in the communist underground could ever be absolutely certain about what had happened during those years of conspiracy. He could never be sure with whom he had really been speaking, and what secret games had been played without his knowledge:
It was not only out of chronological accuracy to start the investigation of the political trials with questions related to the recruitment of the accused into the ranks of the “fascist” political police, but in order to render the accused uncertain and defenseless. The accused himself has never been in the possession of all the relevant facts; the logic of illegality provided only partial, fragmentary information always open to doubt … He could never be absolutely sure, he could not clearly answer all the questions, all his previous acts could be presented under a new description.59
Almost anybody who had ever worked underground could be tripped up, confused, or misled. Anyone could be made to feel guilt about something he might have accidentally said, or unknowingly done. Some openly said so, either at the time or afterward. During his long interrogation, Gomułka was plied with endless, repetitive questions. Day after day, month after month, he was asked to tell the same stories over and over again, from different angles, by different people, almost all of them concerning “controversial” incidents in the now distant past. He was asked how he had met particular people, when he first heard the names of others. He was asked to recall events that had taken place a decade before. Sometimes, an entire day was spent on a single person or incident.60
Several times Gomułka was asked about Spychalski, who had been the leader of the wartime communist militia and in that capacity had led an operation against the Home Army, allegedly in concert with the Gestapo. He was questioned about some more recent comments Spychalski had supposedly made about the need to rid the Polish army of Soviet advisers. He was also asked in enormous detail about the murder of the communist Marceli Nowotko, which took place during the Nazi occupation and which was probably carried out by one of Nowotko’s communist comrades. Gomułka was also accused of knowingly hiring “unreliable” people. In response, he told his interrogators that he had done so because he thought the “unreliables” in question were Soviet agents and that he was obliged to make use of their talents.
The questioning took its toll. Gomułka’s interrogators at first described him as “calm.” Later, however, he became “nervy” and “weepy.” From time to time he wrote plaintive letters to the Central Committee: “As of today I still do not know either the reason for my arrest or the state of my case, although 11 months have passed since I was placed in isolation.” He began to complain of leg pains, a lack of exercise, and poor medical care. He wrote plaintive letters to his son, wondering if he had been forgotten: “Sooner or later I’ll have a breakdown.” All of this was reported to Moscow. Later, after Stalin had died and Gomułka was released—in due course he would replace Bierut as the communist party boss—Nikita Khrushchev would inquire sweetly after Gomułka’s health, even offering to send Soviet doctors to help him recover.
Behind the “nerves” and the “weepiness” surely lay far greater fears. Gomułka knew enough about communism to understand that tortu
re and death might come next. But from his account, and from accounts of the interrogations of Slánský, Spychalski, and others, it’s also clear that the recollection of the past—the murky, confusing, conspiratorial past—created emotional and psychological trauma even when no violence was used at all. The Soviet comrades appear to have understood very well that the people they were dealing with could be made to feel uncertain, uneasy, and even guilty about their lives. This was true of those who had been arrested as well as those who had not been—or not yet. Before he himself was imprisoned, the Czech communist Oskar Langer told his wife: “These men are perhaps not guilty in the everyday sense of the word. But just now the fate and interests of individuals are of secondary importance. Our whole future, maybe the future of mankind, is at stake.”61 Perhaps in the grander scheme of things, which ordinary mortals could not understand, the arrests were somehow necessary. “In the dark,” writes Rév, “it is always difficult to explain appearances in a clear way, for nobody follows normal rules.”
Others felt uneasy as well. Indeed, an ominous sense of déjà vu enveloped communists, communist sympathizers, and former communist sympathizers in both Eastern and Western Europe. Arthur Koestler, the German-Hungarian writer, sat weeping beside his radio in London, “ ‘convulsed’ for two days” by the public confessions of his old comrade Otto Katz, on trial in Prague.62 He and others had witnessed all of this before, though many had repressed these bad memories for the sake of the battle against fascism. Now the duplicitousness of the Soviet regime was staring them in the face once again. And once again all of the party slogans looked empty and ominous. “My life is at an end,” said the Czechoslovak victim, Geminder, “and the only thing I can do is to embark on a road of truth and thus save the party … I am walking to the gallows with a heavy heart but relatively calm … the air is becoming purer and one obstacle along the victorious road to socialism is being removed. The party is always right …”63
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