Postwar

50

It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess their calculations. Stalin may well have been mad, but he was not stupid.

51

They were executed nonetheless. Three weeks after his death, the regime published Petkov’s posthumous ‘confession’. But this was so obviously faked that it rapidly became an embarrassment, even in Communist Bulgaria. The authorities ceased to speak of it and the Bulgarian secret police chief who had injudiciously arranged for its publication was duly shot.

52

As late as 1966, four-fifths of Polish state employees had only a primary school education. The country was run by a strikingly under-educated administrative caste.

53

In 1924 the 27-year-old Kostov was arrested and tortured by the Bulgarian police. Afraid that he might betray the (underground) Communists he leaped from a fourth-floor window at police headquarters in Sofia and broke both his legs.

54

The Bund was a Jewish labor movement whose roots lay in pre-war czarist Russia and whose interwar activities were confined to Poland.

55

See Heda Margolius Kovaly, Under a Cruel Star (1986). In the eighteen months following the end of World War Two more Jews were killed in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia than in the ten years preceding the war.

56

Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (Yale University Press, 2002), edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, page 52. Following a familiar pattern, Komarov himself would later be imprisoned and executed—pleading to the last his anti-Semitic credentials.

57

The survivors were all released in later years, though they and their fellow victims would not be fully rehabilitated and exonerated until 1968.

58

The script was very precise. When Andre Marty was unofficially ‘tried’ by the Central Committee of the French Communist Party in December 1952, his ‘prosecutor’, Leon Mauvais, accused him of speaking of ‘the Trotskyist International’ rather than ‘Trotskyist scum’ or ‘group of Trotskyist police spies’, which were the Communists’ ‘natural and habitual’ terms for use when referring to Trotskyists. This linguistic slippage alone placed Marty under grave suspicion.

59

Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th-Century Russia (2000), page 249.

60

Translation by Professor Marci Shore of Indiana University, slightly amended by TJ. I am also indebted to Professor Shore for the quotation from Ludek Pachman.

61

Zdenek Mlynar, Night Frost in Prague (London, 1980), page 2.

62

Brecht, characteristically, hedged his bets by retaining an Austrian passport.