The Devil in History

As Koestler once pointed out (in his 1938 letter of resignation from the exiled German Communist Writers’ Union), for Lenin it was not enough to smash his enemy—he wanted to make him look contemptible. Laszlo Rajk, Lucre?iu Patra?canu, Rudolf Slansky, Ana Pauker, Vladimir Clementis, Traicho Kostov, Bedrich Geminder, Artur London, Rudolf Margolius—all of them had to be portrayed as despicable scoundrels and scurrilous vermin. Yesterday’s heroes had become today’s scum.³⁶ To a certain extent, Robert C. Tucker is right to point out that “the show trials of 1936-1938… for Stalin were a dramatization of his conspiracy view of the Soviet and contemporary world…. The Stalinist terror was in large part an expression of the needs of the dictatorial personality of Stalin, and these needs continued to generate the terror as long as he lived.”³⁷ However, at the core of Lenin’s vision of a new society lay an exterminist ethos. Bukharin, whom Cohen labeled the “last Bolshevik” and who considered himself the true heir of Lenin, emphasized in his volume Economics of the Transition Period, published in 1920, that “proletarian coercion in all of its forms, beginning with shooting and ending with labor conscription, is… a method of creating communist mankind out of the human materials of the capitalist epoch.” By the beginning of the 1930s, Bukharin had shifted to a theory of “growing into socialism.” However, as he had wisely been warned by Trotsky, “The system of apparatus terror cannot come to a stop only at the so-called ideological deviations, real or imagined, but must inevitably spread throughout the entire life and activities of the organization.”³⁸ The Great Terror might have been Stalin’s doing and might have reflected his “warfare personality” (as Tucker argues), but the principle of widespread excisionary violence against those opposed or alien to dictatorship of the proletariat was encoded at the heart of Leninism.

Especially after 1951, Stalinist anti-Western, anti-intellectual, and anti-Titoist obsessions merged with an increasingly rabid anti-Semitism:

Stalin feared that other peace champ countries would follow the independent Yugoslav model and break away from the influential sphere of the Soviet Union. He instigated the terror of political trials to uncover “enemies” within each Communist Party in order to discourage dissent. Victims were sought out and accused of connection with Tito’s opposition attitudes and treachery. In later cases, the Soviets turned to Zionism and its supposed link with Western imperialism as the cause of the Communist betrayal. The show trial was a propaganda arm of political terror. Its aim was to personalize an abstract political enemy, to place it in the dock in flesh and blood and, with the aid of a perverted system of justice, to transform abstract political-ideological differences into easily intelligible common crimes. It both incited the masses against the evil embodied by defendants and frightened them away from supporting any potential opposition.³⁹

Among the East European Stalinist legal frame-ups, the Slansky trial in Prague, in the fall of 1952, symbolized the ultimate conversion of Bolshevism into an emerging version of Communist-Fascism. The selection of the defense (eleven of the fourteen were prominent Communists of Jewish descent); the vicious brutality of the interrogations, which included crude anti-Semitic slurs; the hysterical anti-Zionist media campaigns in Czechoslovakia and the other Communist countries; the rabidly racist indictment uttered by the chief prosecutor, Josef Urvalek; the direct involvement of Stalin’s envoys in the concoction of this mega-provocation—all these elements conjured up an unprecedented chain of broken illusions, bitter vendettas, and betrayed loyalties. In the words of Artur London, one of three survivors of the trial and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the French anti-Nazi maquis, who was at the moment of his arrest in 1951 deputy foreign minister of Czechoslovakia: “Every physical and moral torture was carried to an extreme. I had been forced to walk on continuously…. [I]t went on for months, and was made all the worse by my having to keep my arms to my sides. My feet and legs became swelled. The skin round my toenail burst, and the blisters became suppurating wounds.”⁴⁰ The son of Margolius, one of the defendants, imagines his father’s thoughts the night before the trial opened at the High Court in Pankrac on November 20, 1952:

Rudolf recalled reading Soren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety written in 1844, where the great philosopher stated: “The individual becomes guilty not because he is guilty but because of his anxiety about being thought guilty.” Rudolf felt it was his duty to perform as demanded; he was not guilty but the Party asked him to support it in its hour of need… ironically it was exactly like Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which [Pavel] Tigrid [a major figure of the Czech democratic exile] had lent him. [Karol] Bacilek [the Stalinist minister of state security, 1952-53] sounded like Gletkin, who told Rubashov: “Your testimony at the trial will be the last service you can do to the party.” The Party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time, exacted his will in sacrifice. Except all that had been fiction: Rudolf was in the real world.⁴¹

On the second day of the Slansky trial, Bedrich Geminder, a former Comintern official and chief of the International Department of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, was subjected to unspeakable deprecations linked to his German-Jewish origin:

Judge Novak: “What nationality are you?”

Defendant Geminder: “Czech”

Judge Novak: “Can you speak Czech well?”

Defendent Geminder: “Yes.”

Judge Novak: “Do you want an interpreter?”

Defendant Geminder: “No.”

…

Prosecutor Urvalek: “… you never really learned to speak Czech well, not even in 1946 when you came back to Czechoslovakia and occupied important posts in the Communist Party?”

Defendent Geminder: “No, I didn’t learn to speak Czech properly.”

…

Prosecutor Urvalek: “You cannot really speak any language properly, can you? You are a typical cosmopolitan. As such you sneaked into the Communist Party.”⁴²

“Rootless cosmopolitanism” was a Stalinist code word, a counterpart to Julius Streicher’s vicious anti- Semitic propaganda. The vilified Geminder, born into a German-Jewish family in Moravia in 1901, had joined a Zionist youth group before he became a member of the Communist Party in 1921. In 1928, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International of Youth (KAM). Following the Munich Pact of 1938, Geminder moved to the Soviet Union, where he joined the Comintern as head of its Press and Information Service under the nom de guerre G. Friedrich.⁴³ For his revolutionary services he was given the Order of Lenin. He was married to Irene Falcon, a Spanish Communist and personal secretary to the general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party, the legendary Dolores Ibarruri, la Passionaria.⁴⁴ Sentenced to death on November 27, 1952, Geminder was shot on December 3. On March 6, 1953, Stalin passed away.⁴⁵

The magic impact of power in classical Stalinism would have been unthinkable in the absence of ideology. They feed each other; power derives its mesmerizing force from the seductive potential of ideology. Man is proclaimed omnipotent, and ideology supervises the identification of abstract man with concrete power. Veneration of power is rooted in contempt for traditional values, including those associated with the survival of reason. It is important, therefore, to resist the temptation of critical thought, since reason is the enemy of total regimentation. To quote one of Stalin’s most important (and vicious) accomplices, Lazar Kaganovich, “Treachery in politics always begins with the revision of theory.”⁴⁶ In one of his late aphorisms, Max Horkheimer hinted at the philosophical revolution provoked by Marxism. Defending the dignity of the individual subject becomes a seditious undertaking, a challenge to the prevailing myth of homogeneity: “However socially conditioned the individual’s thinking may be, however necessarily it may relate to social questions, to political action, it remains the thought of the individual which is not just the effect of collective processes but can also take them as its object.”⁴⁷ Political shamanism, practiced by alleged adversaries of mysticism, thwarts attempts to resist the continual assault on the mind. Marxism-Leninism, which was the code name for the ideology of the nomenklatura, aimed to dominate both the public and private spheres of social life. Man,