Postwar

had forfeited the confidence of the government
and could regain it only through redoubled efforts.
Wouldn’t it be simpler under these circumstances
for the government to dissolve the people
and elect another one?

Angry, disaffected workers on the industrialized western edge of the Soviet empire were a poor advertisement for Communism, but they hardly represented a threat to Soviet power—and it is not coincidental that both the Plzen and Berlin uprisings took place after Stalin’s death. In Stalin’s time the truly threatening challenge came, as it seemed, from within the Communist apparatus itself. This was the real implication of the Yugoslav schism, and it was in direct response to ‘Titoism’ that Stalin thus reverted to earlier methods, updated and adapted to circumstances. From 1948 through 1954, the Communist world underwent a second generation of arrests, purges and, above all, political ‘show trials’.

The chief precedent for the purges and trials of these years was of course the Soviet Terror of the 1930s. Then, too, the main victims had been Communists themselves, the goal being to purge the Party of ‘traitors’ and other challenges to the policy and person of the General Secretary. In the 1930s the presumptive ringleader was Leon Trotsky—like Tito, a genuine Communist hero un-beholden to Stalin and with views of his own about Communist strategy and practice. The Terror of the thirties had secured and illustrated Stalin’s untrammeled power and authority, and the purges of the post-war years would serve a similar objective in Eastern Europe.

But whereas the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, particularly the 1938 trial of Nikolai Bukharin, had been sui generis, theatrical innovations whose shock value lay in the grisly spectacle of the Revolution consuming not just its children but its very architects, the trials and purges of later decades were shameless copies, deliberately modeled on past Soviet practice, as though the satellite regimes hardly merited even an effort at verisimilitude. And they came, after all, at the end of a long string of judicial purges.

In addition to the post-war trials for treason and the political trials of anti-Communist politicians, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had used the courts to punish and close down the churches everywhere except Poland, where open confrontation with the Catholic Church was deemed too risky. In 1949 the leaders of the United Protestant Church in Bulgaria were tried for conspiracy to ‘restore capitalism’. The previous year the Uniate Church in Romania was forcibly merged with the more pliable Romanian Orthodox church by the new Communist regime, in keeping with a long tradition of persecution reaching back to the Russian czars of the eighteenth-century. Selected Catholic priests were tried on two separate occasions in Prague on charges of spying for the Vatican (and the USA), receiving sentences ranging from ten years to life imprisonment; by the early 1950s there were eight thousand monks and nuns in Czechoslovak prisons. Monsignor Grosz, who succeeded the imprisoned Cardinal Mindszenty as head of the Catholic Church in Hungary in January 1949, was found guilty of working to restore the Habsburgs and of plotting with Titoists to arm Hungarian Fascists.

The trials of Communists themselves fell into two distinct groups. The first, beginning in 1948 and lasting through 1950, were immediate responses to the Tito-Stalin rift. In Albania, Communist Interior Minister Koci Xoxe was tried in May-June 1949, found guilty and hanged the following month. Charged with Titoism, Xoxe had the distinction of really having been a supporter of Tito and his plans for the Balkans, at a time when these had Moscow’s backing. In this respect his case was a little unusual, as was the fact that it was handled in secret.

The Albanian trial was followed by the arrest, trial and execution in Bulgaria of Traicho Kostov, one of the founders of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Kostov, crippled by his sufferings at the hands of Bulgaria’s inter-war rulers,[53] was if anything a known opponent of Tito and critic of the latter’s plans to absorb Bulgaria into a Balkan Federation (Tito disliked Kostov and the sentiment was mutual). But Stalin distrusted him anyway—Kostov had imprudently criticized a Soviet-Bulgarian economic agreement as unfavorable to his country—and he was an ideal candidate for a trial intended to illustrate the crimes of nationalism.

He and his ‘group’ (‘The Treacherous Espionage and Wrecking Group of TraichoKostov’) were charged in December 1949 with collaboration with pre-war Bulgarian Fascists, espionage on behalf of British intelligence and conspiring with Tito. After finally giving in under sustained torture and signing his ‘confession’ of guilt, Kostov refused to speak the pre-agreed text in his courtroom appearance, publicly retracted his statement to his interrogators and was carried out of the courtroom protesting his innocence. Two days later, on December 16th 1949, Kostov was hanged, and his ‘co-conspirators’ sentenced to long imprisonment in accordance with decisions taken by Stalin and his police chief Lavrenti Beria before the trial had begun. Kostov’s case was unusual in that he was the only East European Communist who retracted his confession and protested his innocence at a public trial. This caused some minor international embarrassment for the regime (Kostov’s trial was broadcast on radio and widely reported in the West) and instructions were given that this must never happen again. It did not.

Shortly before Kostov’s execution the Hungarian Communists had staged a show trial of their would-be ‘Tito’, Communist Interior Minister Laszlo 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: Wladislaw Gomulka, Secretary General of the Polish United Workers Party and Vice-President of the Polish Council of Ministers. Gomulka 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 Boleslaw 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 Gomulka and his ‘group’ of nationalism and Titoism.

Reduced to the post of administrator for Social Assurance in Warsaw, Gomulka 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 Gomulka’s arrest in 1951. And in a scheme devised by the secret services in Moscow, Gomulka 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 Gomulka.