A Bulgarian version of the Rajk event was supposed to take place earlier, though it was modest in comparison, mainly because Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov and his close comrade Traicho Kostov already had killed tens of thousands of would-be opponents. Stalin knew Kostov, the general secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1944–45) and deputy prime minister (1946–49). He was a man so committed to the cause that when he was under fierce interrogation by Bulgarian police in 1924, he had jumped from a window on the fourth floor, willing to fall to his death lest he betray comrades. If his legs were broken and back deformed, his spirit was not. Indeed, after 1945, when Soviet occupation authorities wanted to collect information on the Bulgarian economy, Kostov resisted. On December 6, 1948, when he visited Moscow, Stalin dressed him down and threatened him: “This is exactly how our conflict with Tito began!”29
Early in the new year, Soviet officials in Sofia sent Stalin a lengthy and damning report on the political mood in Bulgaria. Although the people loved the USSR, many thought they could follow their “special path” to socialism and did not want or need much from Moscow. Kostov was said to be the worst of the Communist leaders and “not to be trusted.” The report claimed that, under the guise of caring for Dimitrov’s health, Kostov tried to get him out of the country for extended periods and then inserted “his own people” in key places. The Soviets lauded Dimitrov for being cooperative, but certainly not Kostov; in short, the report confirmed Stalin’s judgment that here was a Tito in the making.30
In March 1949 the Bulgarian Central Committee removed Kostov from the government for reasons that could have been dictated by Stalin. They focused on his “nationalism” and claimed that he had sown the seeds of distrust between the USSR and Bulgarian governments. By the summer he was expelled from the party, and preparations were made for a show trial. In the meantime Dimitrov was taken ill and flown to Moscow for treatment. Had he been healthier, he likely would have led the attack, for he read the relevant documents from his sickbed and on May 10 recommended proceeding against the man he hatefully called “an intellectual individualist and a ruthless careerist.”31 Dimitrov himself died in Moscow on July 2, and if for years there were rumors he was murdered, in fact, his utterly slavish loyalty to Stalin was such that it is more likely that he died of natural causes.32
Along with Kostov, two hundred more arrests followed, from whom they picked ten for a big show trial staged between December 7 and 14, 1949. It was broadcast on radio, and the entire process was directed from Moscow. During the proceedings, rallies and meetings were organized nationally. The crowds howled out their hatred and screamed for Kostov’s death. When the court verdict was reached, and he was hanged, some people danced with joy, or at least made a public show of their hatred for the man, in order to prove they were team players, could be trusted, and should be rewarded.
Between 1948 and 1953, 100,000 members of the Communist Party were closely examined by the authorities. In addition, each year two to six thousand or more people were arrested “on political grounds,” and usually between 60 and 80 were executed. In the same period, there were campaigns against representatives of the various religions. The famed tolerance of the Bulgarian people was being ignored in favor of a Stalinist-style regime.33
A young man who lived next door to Kostov remembered all the “enemy mania” of the times. Georgi Markov witnessed how people gave in to the temptation to curse and to blame and to hate. Even in the 1970s, he urged the truth on his people: “Let us not lie to ourselves today by conveniently blaming Stalin for everything. The tragic truth is that Stalin was not alone, that Stalin would not even have existed if it had not been for the little Stalins, the thousands upon thousands of his followers, nameless criminals.”34 Markov himself was forced into exile and assassinated in 1978.
In Romania, the purge of the party, likely sparked by Yugoslavia’s break with Moscow, began in November 1948 and ran until May 1950. It removed 192,000 members as “exploiting and hostile elements.” A separate purge of “nationalist” leaders and suspected Tito supporters focused especially on Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, who wanted to pursue a Romanian “road to socialism.” He had been an activist as far back as the 1930s, had been jailed during the war, and later had served as minister of justice. By all accounts, he was a gifted intellectual who was resented by the party’s general secretary, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. Worse still, he had awakened Stalin’s suspicions.
At the Cominform meetings in 1949, Gheorghiu-Dej said that his country also had “imperialist agents” just like Hungary’s Rajk, and he mentioned the already imprisoned Pătrăşcanu. From December 1949 to January 1950, another fifty-one people were also picked up and interrogated, but without getting much out of them. Just as in similar cases in the other satellite countries, the Romanians asked Moscow to send torture specialists. The regime wanted enough material for a sensational show trial and ultimately staged one from April 6 to 13, 1954. Pătrăşcanu and one other person were executed, while the rest were given long prison terms.35
Gheorghiu-Dej capitalized on Soviet orders to flush out “enemies.”36 He used anti-Zionism to eliminate one of his main rivals: Ana Pauker, who was arrested on February 18, 1953. She had been a faithful servant of the party for years, someone of note and stature. Although she and her non-Jewish allies were said to be connected to “the international Jewish plot,” the Romanian authorities purged her not simply in the name of ethnic “purification,” because her successor at the Ministry of External Affairs was Simion Bughici, who was also Jewish.37
After Stalin’s death, Pauker was released, and though her career was over, her love for Communism was not. In mid-1956 a party commission questioned her, and what she said at one point should remind us of the power and meaning of Stalin’s model for the true believers: “If a Soviet official told me something, it was the gospel for me. That’s how I was brought up. I’m telling you that things got to the point that anything Soviet was considered wonderful. If they had told me that the USSR needed it, I would have done it. A mistake, no doubt, but I would have done it. If they had told me to throw myself into the fire, I would have done so.”38
In Romania, as in all the countries dominated by the Communists, it is difficult to put together the exact number of victims of Stalinization. One 1950s document from the Ministry of the Interior states that for the period 1948–1953, police arrested 60,428 people on various political grounds, ranging from defaming the regime, to spreading forbidden leaflets, to “enemy religious activity.” Of these, 24,826 were arrested in 1952 at the high point of the mania unleashed since 1948. For the remainder of the 1950s the Securitate picked up between two and six thousand “enemies” per year. Quite apart from this political repression, the regime backed up its forced collectivization of agriculture in the three years following the land reform of March 1949, with the arrest of more than 80,000 peasants.39
Gheorghiu-Dej ended up with complete control of the party and continued the Stalinization of the country until his death on March 19, 1965. He was succeeded by Nicolae Ceauşescu, who ruled as one of the most repressive dictators in Eastern Europe until the regime collapsed in 1989.