Postwar

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 Slansky was only ever referred to as ‘the spy Slansky’, 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: Slansky 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 all 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 outre accusations against Slansky 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 Slansky? 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 Laszlo Rajk had served in Spain (as a political commissar of the ‘Rakosi battalion’); so had Otto Sling, one of Slansky’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 Immigre (MOI). Prominent post-war Communists like Artur London (another Slansky 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 Slansky 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 confreres, 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 Rakosi and Gero—the Hungarian Party leaders who stage- managed his trial—were ‘Muscovites’ (though Gero 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 Slansky) 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