The Devil in History

was part of the standard public ritual that one had to go through to be a Bolshevik and to show one’s commitment and loyalty.⁸¹

While the specter of a massive pogrom loomed over the Soviet Jewish population, in the people’s democracies, the struggle against “rootless cosmopolitanism” allowed certain local leaders to engage in an elite purge against the “Muscovite” factions dominated by Communists of Jewish extraction (many of whom had fled Fascism and had sought refuge in the Soviet Union between the two wars).⁸² The elimination of those otherwise totally loyal Stalinists reached a spectacular level in Czechoslovakia, where the chief defendant was Rudolf Slansky, who until September 1951 had been the general secretary of the ruling Communist Party and in that capacity had presided over the ruthless persecution of Communists and non-Communists. Since the trial had to confirm Stalin’s conviction about the existence of a worldwide conspiracy threatening the Communist bloc, there was no way to exonerate any of the defendants. Furthermore, the anti-Semitic charges were bound to appeal to pro-Communist chauvinistic prejudices in the whole region. The numerous instances of anti-Semitism under so-called state socialism cannot be simply disregarded as aberrations. As Vassily Grossman rightly pointed out, since under totalitarian regimes there is no civil society, “there can only be state anti-Semitism.”⁸³ Under Communism, the Jews became a target of policies of exclusion, isolation, and punishment on the basis of their ethnicity, were deemed potentially disloyal (“enemies of the people”) and inherently bourgeois (“class enemies”). Jewish identity turned at times under Communism into an innate, invariable, and even hereditary source of otherness that called for state-engineered excision.

In addition, postwar Stalinist anti-Semitism forced Jewish Communists to persevere in the denial of their own identity. Very few maintained their Jewish names (Ana Pauker, Jakub Berman), while most adopted names attuned to ethnic majorities (Matyas Rakosi, Roman Zambrowski, Leonte Rautu). Generally speaking, Jewish Communists abjured their background, proudly severed all links with their ancestors’ traditions, and engaged in vitriolic attacks on “Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” They were, to use Isaac Deutscher’s term, “non-Jewish Jews.” After 1945, though, “Jewish Stalinists… were caught between Stalinist anti-Semitism in Moscow and popular anti- Semitism in their own country.” For example, Timothy Snyder remarks that in Poland “Jewish communists had to stress that their political identification with the Polish nation was so strong that it erased their Jewish origins and removed any possibility of distinct Jewish policies.”⁸⁴ Under the circumstances, Stalinist anti- Semitism was both criminal and conducive to an entire community’s erasure from the recognized grand narratives of the postwar order under Communism.

A direct consequence of the Slansky events in Czechoslovakia was the purge trial of Paul Merker, a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) since 1946. His initial downfall came about because of his relationship during the Second World War with Noel Field and Otto Katz (part of the group tried and executed in Prague in 1951). However, the crux of the accusations against Merker concerned his opinions and positions on the Jewish question in post-194 5 Germany. In 1952, the SED’s Central Party Control Commission produced a document that detailed Merker’s errors. Unsurprisingly, it was entitled “Lessons of the Trial against the Slansky Conspiracy Centre.” The commission insisted that Merker was involved in “the criminal activity of Zionist organizations,” which, allied with “American agents,” aimed to destroy the “people’s democracies” in Eastern Europe. Additionally, it claimed that Merker tried “winning over SED comrades of Jewish descent.”⁸⁵ During interrogation (both by the Stasi and the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), Merker was stamped as a Judenknecht (“servant of the Jews”). In an interesting twist, even after the 1954 resolution of the Noel Field case, Merker was not released. On the contrary, now his whole trial was focused on his alleged collaboration with Jewish capitalist and cosmopolitan circles. He was sentenced in 1955 to eight years in prison but was released in 1956 without ever being fully rehabilitated. Nevertheless, Merker and his spouse never attempted to flee to West Germany. Taking an exemplarily Rubashov-like approach, Merker stated, “In the trial against me, I did without a defense lawyer in order to help keep the proceedings absolutely secret.” Again, the (il) logic of Stalinism was at work: “He had made efforts to prevent ‘enemies of the DDR’ from using his case, and he and his wife had been and would remain silent about the case.”⁸⁶ His trial, sentence, and interrogation minutes were indeed kept secret, emerging only after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In May 1952 the Romanian media announced the elimination of three members of the Politburo, two of whom had been the leaders of the party’s Moscow emigre center during World War II. All three had been party secretaries and had shared absolute power with the leader of the domestic faction, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Ana Pauker, a veteran Communist leader who long had been lionized by international propaganda as an impeccable Communist fighter, lost her job as minister of foreign affairs and was put under house arrest. Her Muscovite ally, the Hungarian-born Vasile Luca, was accused of economic sabotage during his tenure as minister of finance and of collaboration with the bourgeois police during the party’s underground activity. Luca was arrested and died in prison in the early 1960s. The third member of the group, Teohari Georgescu, a home Communist and former minister of internal affairs whose principal fault consisted in his close association with the Pauker-Luca faction, was also jailed but soon released, though never reinstated in party positions. The Romanian case is a perfect example of country dynamics determined by party factionalism and sectarianism. It can be said that the more marginal and less historically representative a Communist party was, the more profound its sectarianism was. The Romanian Communist Party (RCP), torn apart by internal struggles among its three centers⁸⁷ during the underground period, preserved a besieged fortress mentality even after World War II. Given that in the pre-1945 period mutual accusations had usually resulted in the expulsion of the members of the defeated faction, once the party was in power, the effects of the continued struggles were catastrophic. Once established as a ruling party, the RCP projected a vision based on exclusiveness, fierce dogmatism, and universal suspicion at the national level.

The mystique of the party called for complete abrogation of its members’ critical faculties. As Franz Borkenau put it, Communism, “a Utopia based upon the belief in the omnipotence of the ‘vanguard,’ cannot live without a scapegoat, and the procedures applied to detect them, invent them, become only more cruel and reckless.”⁸⁸ For all practical purposes, the political history of the international Communist movement is the history of continual purges of different factions branded by the victors as “anti-party deviations.” Those defeated in party power struggles were labeled factionalists, whereas the winners were lionized as champions of the “holy cause” of party unity.

Whereas the Slansky trial and the “doctor’s plot” seem to represent the limits of the Stalinist system’s irrationality, the purge of the Pauker-Luca-Georgescu group is primarily an expression of domestic revolutionary pragmatism. This process involved massive purges of the Jewish Democratic Committee and the Hungarian Committee, suggesting a concerted campaign of weakening the Moscow faction. In the Byzantine schemes that devoured the Romanian Communist elite, the mystical internationalism of the Comintern period was gradually replaced by a cynical position embellished with nationalist, even xenophobic, motifs. Gheorghiu-Dej and his acolytes not only speculated about Stalin’s anti-Semitism but did not hesitate to play the same card.⁸⁹ The stakes were absolute power, and the Jewishness of rivals was an argument that could be used with the Soviet dictator. If the national Stalinists were the prime beneficiaries of Stalin’s warning not to transform the party from a “social and class party into a race party,”⁹⁰ they were neither its initiators nor its architects. No less caught up in the same perverse mechanism of self- humiliation than their Polish and Hungarian colleagues, the Romanian Stalinists—Gheorghiu-Dej, Chi?inevschi, and Ceau?escu as much as Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca—were willing perpetrators of Stalin’s designs. They were allowed by the Soviet dictator to gain autonomy not from the center but from another generation of the center’s agents. It was indeed a sort of moment of emancipation, but one that signaled Moscow’s sanctioning of the coming of age of a new Stalinist elite in Romania. The history of the Stalinist ruling group in other East-Central European countries is strikingly similar. There is the same sense of political predestination, the same lack of interest in national values, the same obsequiousness vis-a-vis the Kremlin.

An indicator of the continuous Stalinist nature of the Romanian regime, of its permanent purge mentalite, is Leonte Rautu’s fateful longevity in the highest power echelons as the high priest of a cultural revolution a la roumaine.⁹¹ A prominent party veteran of Bessarabian-Jewish origin, perfectly fluent in Russian, he was the architect of anticultural politics of Stalinism in Romania. Until his removal from the Political Executive Committee in the summer of 1981, he epitomized a perinde ac cadaver commitment to the Marxist-Leninist cause.