Postwar

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 Patrascanu. Patrascanu’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 Patrascanu’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 Patrascanu 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’ Patrascanu 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 Ceausescu) 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 Slansky 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 Vladimir 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 Slansky. Unlike Gottwald, who was a serviceable figurehead and pliable Party loyalist, Slansky, though eminently Stalinist (like Rajk before him), was a Jew.

At first Gottwald was reluctant to have Slansky 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 Slansky to the CIA, and Gottwald gave way. On November 23rd 1951 Slansky 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 Slansky 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’, ‘Slansky… 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 Rude Pravo editorialized thus: ‘One trembles with disgust and repulsion at the sight of these cold, unfeeling beings. The Judas Slansky’, 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 Slansky 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 Slansky 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