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 Slánský 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 confrères, 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 Rákosi and Gerö—the Hungarian Party leaders who stage-managed his trial—were ‘Muscovites’ (though Gerö 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 Slánský) 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 took second place to Georgii Dimitrov, newly returned from Moscow, until his wartime record was turned against him in 1949. In Poland Gomułka had organized armed resistance under the Nazis, together with Marian Spychalski; after the war Stalin favored Bierut and other Moscow-based Poles. Spychalski and Gomułka were both later arrested and, as we have seen, narrowly avoided starring in their own show trial.
There were exceptions. In Romania it was one ‘national’ Communist, Dej, who engineered the downfall of another ‘national’ Communist, Pătrăşcanu, as well as the eclipse of the impeccably Muscovite and Stalinist Ana Pauker. And even Kostov had spent the early thirties in Moscow, at the Comintern’s Balkan desk. He was also a well-attested critic of Tito (although for his own reasons: Kostov saw in Tito the heir to Serbian territorial ambitions at Bulgarian expense). Far from saving him, however, this just exacerbated his crime—Stalin was not interested in agreement or even consent, only unswerving obedience.
Lastly, there was a considerable element of personal score-settling and cynical instrumentalism in the selection of trial victims and the charges against them. As Karol Bacílek explained to the National Conference of the Czech Communist Party on December 17th 1952, ‘The question as to who is guilty and who is innocent will in the end be decided upon by the Party with the help of the National Security Organs. ’ In some instances the latter fabricated cases against people out of coincidence or fantasy; in others they deliberately claimed the opposite of what they knew to be the case. Thus two of the defendants in the Slánský trial were accused of over-billing Moscow for Czech products. Typically, goods made in the satellite states were deliberately under-priced to Soviet advantage; only Moscow could authorize exceptions. The ‘over-billing’ in the Czech case, however, was established Soviet practice, as the prosecutors well knew: a way of funneling cash through Prague and on to the West, for use in intelligence operations.
Similarly cynical—and part of a campaign of personal vilification—was the charge against Ana Pauker, who was accused of Rightist and Leftist ‘deviationism’ simultaneously: first she had been ‘critical’ of rural collectivization, then she forced peasants to collectivize against their will. Rajk was accused of dissolving the Communist Party’s network within the Hungarian police in 1947; in fact he had done this (on the eve of the 1947 elections and with official approval) as a cover for the dissolution of the far stronger Social Democratic police organization. Later he had secretly re-established the Communist network while maintaining the ban on other parties. But his actions, impeccably orthodox at the time, were grist to the Soviet mill when the time came to remove him.
The defendants at the major show trials were all Communists. Other Communists were purged without public trials or without any judicial process at all. But the overwhelming majority of Stalin’s victims, in the Soviet Union and the satellite states, were of course not Communists at all. In Czechoslovakia, in the years 1948-54, Communists represented just one-tenth of 1 percent of those condemned to prison terms or work camps, one in twenty of those condemned to death. In the GDR the Stasi was created on February 8th 1950, with the task of overseeing and controlling not just Communists but the whole of society. Stalin was routinely suspicious not only of Communists with contacts or experience in the West, but of
anyone
who had lived outside the Soviet bloc.
It thus went without saying that virtually the entire population of eastern Europe fell under Kremlin suspicion in those years. Not that the post-war repression
within
the Soviet Union was any less all-embracing: just as Russians’ exposure to Western influence in the years 1813-15 was believed to have paved the way for the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, so Stalin feared contamination and protest as a result of wartime contacts in his own day. Any Soviet citizen or soldier who survived Nazi occupation or imprisonment was thus an object of suspicion. When the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet passed a law in 1949, punishing soldiers who committed rape with 10 to 15 years in a labour camp, disapproval of the Red Army’s rampage across eastern Germany and Austria was the least of its concerns. The real motive was to fashion a device with which to punish returning Soviet soldiers at will.
The scale of the punishment meted out to the citizens of the USSR and Eastern Europe in the decade following World War Two was monumental—and, outside the Soviet Union itself, utterly unprecedented. Trials were but the visible tip of an archipelago of repression: prison, exile, forced labor battalions. In 1952, at the height of the second Stalinist terror, 1.7 million prisoners were held in Soviet labor camps, a further 800,000 in labor colonies, and 2,753,000 in ‘special settlements’. The ‘normal’ Gulag sentence was 25 years, typically followed (in the case of survivors) by exile to Siberia or Soviet Central Asia. In Bulgaria, from an industrial workforce of just under half a million, two persons out of nine were slave laborers.
In Czechoslovakia it is estimated that there were 100,000 political prisoners in a population of 13 million in the early 1950s, a figure that does not include the many tens of thousands working as forced laborers in everything but name in the country’s mines. ‘Administrative liquidations’, in which men and women who disappeared into prison were quietly shot without publicity or trial, were another form of punishment. A victim’s family might wait a year or more before learning that he or she had ‘disappeared’. Three months later the person was then legally presumed dead, though with no further official acknowledgement or confirmation. At the height of the terror in Czechoslovakia some thirty to forty such announcements would appear in the local press every day. Tens of thousands disappeared this way; many hundreds of thousands more were deprived of their privileges, apartments, jobs.
In Hungary, during the years 1948-53, about one million people (of a total population of less than ten million) are estimated to have suffered arrest, prosecution, imprisonment or deportation. One Hungarian family in three was directly affected. Relatives suffered commensurately. Fritzi Loebl, the wife of one of Slánský’s ‘coconspirators’, was kept for a year in the prison at Ruzyn, outside Prague, and interrogated by Russians who called her a ‘stinking yid prostitute’. Upon her release she was exiled to a factory in north Bohemia. The wives of prisoners and deportees lost their employment, their apartments and their personal effects. At best, if they were lucky, they were then forgotten, like Josephine Langer, whose husband Oskar Langer, a witness at the Slánský trial, was later sentenced in a secret trial to 22 years in prison. She and her daughters lived for six years in a cellar.
Romania saw perhaps the worst persecution, certainly the most enduring. In addition to well over a million detainees in prisons, labor camps and slave labor on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, of whom tens of thousands died and whose numbers don’t include those deported to the Soviet Union, Romania was remarkable for the severity of its prison conditions and various ‘experimental’ prisons; notably the one at Piteşti where, for three years from December 1949 through late 1952, prisoners were encouraged to ‘re-educate’ one another through physical and psychological torture. Most of the victims were students, ‘Zionists’ and non-Communist political detainees.
The Communist state was in a permanent condition of undeclared war against its own citizens. Like Lenin, Stalin understood the need for enemies, and it was in the logic of the Stalinist state that it was constantly mobilizing against its foes—external, but above all domestic. In the words of Stephan Rais, Czechoslovak Justice Minister, addressing the June 11th 1952 Conference of Czechoslovak Attorneys:
[the attorney] must . . . rely on the most mature, solely correct and truthful science in the world, on Soviet legal science, and thoroughly avail himself of the experiences of Soviet legal practice . . . An inevitable necessity of our period is the ever increasing class struggle.
The martial vocabulary so beloved of Communist rhetoric echoed this conflict-bound condition. Military metaphors abounded: class conflict required alliances, liaison with the masses, turning movements, frontal attacks. Stalin’s assertion that class warfare
accentuated
as socialism approached was adduced to account for the curious fact that even as elections everywhere showed 99 percent support for the Party, its enemies were nevertheless multiplying, the battle had to be fought with ever firmer resolve, and the domestic history of the USSR had to be painstakingly reproduced across the Soviet bloc.
The main enemies were ostensibly the peasant and the bourgeois. But in practice intellectuals were often the easiest target, just as they had been for the Nazis. Andrei Zdanov’s venomous attack on Anna Akhmatova—‘a nun or a whore, or rather a nun
and
a whore, who combines harlotry with prayer. Akhmatova’s poetry is utterly remote from the people’
59
—echoes most of the conventional Stalinist anti-intellectual themes: religion, prostitution, alienation from the masses. Had Akhmatova been Jewish, like much of the central European intelligentsia, the caricature would have been complete.
Political repression, censorship, even dictatorship were by no means unknown in Europe’s eastern half before the coming of Stalinism, although there was universal agreement among those in a position to compare that the interrogators and prisons of inter-war Hungary, Poland or Romania were much to be preferred to those of the ‘popular democracies’. The instruments of control and terror through which the Communist state operated after 1947 were perfected by Stalin’s men, but for the most part they did not need to be imported from the East; they were already in place. It was not by chance that Piteşti prison was set up and run for the Communist Securitate by one Eugen Turcanu, who in an earlier incarnation had been a student activist at Iaşi University for the Iron Guard, Romania’s inter-war Fascist movement.
What distinguished the Party-State of the Communists from its authoritarian predecessors, however, was not so much the sheer efficiency of its repressive apparatus; but rather that power and resources were now monopolized and abused for the near-exclusive benefit of a
foreign
power. Soviet occupation succeeded Nazi occupation with minimal transitional disruption and drew Europe’s eastern half steadily deeper into the Soviet orbit (for the citizens of East Germany, emerging from twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, the transition was smoother still). This process and its consequences—the ‘Sovietization’ and ‘Russification’ of everything in Eastern Europe from manufacturing processes to academic titles—would sooner or later alienate the allegiance of all but the most inveterate Stalinists.
And it had the ancillary effect of blurring many people’s recollection of their initial ambivalence in the face of the Communist transformation. In later years it was easy to forget that the anti-Semitic and frequently xenophobic tone of Stalinist public language had found a sympathetic audience in much of eastern Europe, just as it did in the Soviet Union itself. Economic nationalism had popular local roots too, so that expropriation, nationalization, controls and state regulation of work were by no means unfamiliar. In Czechoslovakia, for example, under the Two-Year Plan introduced in 1946, recalcitrant workers could be exiled to labor camps (though it is also true that most Czech judges in the years 1946-48 refused to apply these penalties).
In its initial phases, then, the Soviet take-over of eastern Europe was not quite as one-sided and brutal a transition as it would appear in retrospect, even if we discount the high hopes vested in the Communist future by a minority of young people in Warsaw or Prague. But just as the Nazis’ brutality had alienated potentially friendly local sentiment in the territories they ‘liberated’ from the USSR in 1941-42, so Stalin soon dispersed illusions and expectations in the satellite states.