MORE STALINIZATION IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND GERMANY
Hungary’s boss Rákosi was particularly exercised about the supposed pervasive infiltration of “spies” in neighboring Czechoslovakia and complained to his Soviet advisers that Czech prime minister and soon-to-be president Klement Gottwald did not take him seriously enough.40 In fact, the Prague coup on February 25, 1948 pushed all non-Communists from government, and there soon followed the arrest of most opposition leaders. Show trials of democratic and Socialist notables were held in Slovakia and Moravia in 1948, and these culminated in a May–June 1950 big event in Prague that featured thirteen leaders, including a Socialist member of parliament, Dr. Milada Horáková, a woman who had fought in the resistance, been captured by the Gestapo, and spent years in a Nazi concentration camp. She was part of the first real show trial in the country, minutely organized by Soviet specialists and given enormous publicity. Ultimately, she was executed on June 27, 1950. Three codefendants suffered the same fate, and the rest were given lengthy prison terms. In December the regime staged a trial of “Vatican agents” to run down church dignitaries. Hundreds of trials followed, and thousands were sentenced. Already in mid-1950, more than one-third of the 32,638 prisoners in Czechoslovakia were locked up for “political” crimes.41
Back in September 1948, Stalin had informed Gottwald in Moscow that his party was infested with Western spies and that he should clean its ranks.42 On September 3 of the next year, the ever-watchful Mátyás Rákosi wrote Gottwald to report that his police had discovered spies in Hungary and that there were even more of them in Czechoslovakia, and he gave names. Gottwald thought these claims were sheer fantasy, but very soon he and Rudolf Slánský, the general secretary of the Communist Party, wrote Moscow to ask for police specialists familiar with the Rajk case in Hungary.43
Major arrests began in November, and some evidence pointed to Slánský who, conveniently enough, was also Jewish. In November 1949, still unsullied, he spoke as the Czech representative to the Cominform meeting in Bucharest and mentioned how “helpful” the Rajk trial had been in exposing Anglo-American spies. “Heightened vigilance” was needed, he said, as was the “timely elimination of elements that are unreliable, alien, and hostile to the Party.”44 He could not have imagined that his own head was already on the block.
Although initially the Czech secret police (StB) and their Soviet helpers thought that there was a conspiracy directed against Slánský, by late summer 1951 they began to conclude that he was part of the plot. In fact, each month from October 1950 to August 1951, one or two major figures were arrested, including cabinet ministers, top StB, and other officials.45
On July 24, 1951, Stalin subtly let Gottwald know that he had seen the materials collected by his specialists on Slánský and that after some deliberation, he had concluded the man could not remain as the general secretary of the party.46 The Czechs moved too slowly for Stalin, and on November 14 he dispatched Anastas Mikoyan to Prague with orders for President Gottwald to have Slánský arrested. Gottwald dragged his feet for nine days until another message from Moscow arrived, and he agreed. Slánský was picked up and so were 220 others, among them some of the most prominent politicians in the country, including Foreign Minister Vladimír Clementis.47 It was no accident that many of them were Jews, who could be accused of being “bourgeois Zionist nationalists,” a charge that fit Stalin’s own imagined “others” of the time.48
What he had in mind for Czechoslovakia was a grand show trial that would be orchestrated by his specialists on the spot. Under interrogation, Slánský admitted to making mistakes, but he obstinately rejected the charge that he was a Zionist. When the jailers screamed that he had staffed the party with Jews, he replied: “The point is not that they were Jews, the point is that they were in the resistance.”49 Those who failed to see this, he said, were racists. He was tough, though prolonged torture finally broke him, and he gave them enough to proceed. He was featured along with thirteen others in an event that lasted a week beginning on November 20, 1952.
The “monster trial” was rehearsed and also broadcast on radio for propaganda purposes. The prosecuting team paid attention to language and wording. Should the accused be called a “conspiratorial Zionist espionage group” or worse? Ultimately the prosecutors opted for the prosaic “anti-state conspiratorial center led by R. Slánský.” Eleven of the fourteen defendants were Jews, but how to refer to them? In the Soviet Union, the accused would be characterized as having “Jewish nationality,” but in Prague officials decided on the absurd mixture of “Czech nationality, Jewish origin.” That the accused were Jews, however, was mentioned often, and it went without saying that all would be found guilty. Eleven were executed, and the other three were given life sentences.50
The show trials were only part of the more wide-ranging repressions of various kinds between 1948 and 1954. For that period alone, an estimated 90,000 citizens were prosecuted for “political crimes”; more than 22,000 were sent to labor camps; and over 10,000 soldiers or conscripts forced into special construction battalions. From 1950 to 1953 various “special actions” of the police and security officials picked up thousands of “anti-state elements,” “kulaks,” as well as bishops, priests, monks, and nuns of the Roman and Greek Catholic churches. The 247,404 private craft firms were, by a law enacted in 1950, forced out of business and a decade later were all but gone, so that nothing of the old society went untouched, including the nation’s sense of independence. This was Stalinist terror in its Czechoslovak setting. It left a legacy of mistrust and fear that undermined public faith in politics and haunted the country long after March 1953, when both Stalin and Gottwald died.51
In neighboring Germany, at least in the eastern part, leaders of the newly created German Democratic Republic (GDR) did not miss out on the enemy mania. By the time leaders Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl met with Stalin on April 1, 1952, they had already purged the Socialist Unity Party (SED) of 317,000 members, roughly one-fifth of the total number.52 Pieck desired holding “open trials” of the saboteurs and Western spies, and Stalin agreed.53
Six names of prominent SED leaders had come to light in August 1950, thanks to information from the Rajk affair in Hungary. The most senior politically was Paul Merker, a veteran and member of the Politburo as far back as 1926. Although he was not Jewish, the others were, and the SED prepared “a German Slánský” trial with a distinctly anti-Zionist tone. Although Merker was finally arrested only on December 3, 1952, the plans for a big event never materialized. Instead a few trials were held in secret after Stalin’s death, and they resulted in no executions.
As George Hodos, who went through the ordeal himself in connection with the Rajk trial in Hungary, has said, the show trials were the “propaganda arm of political terror.” Their 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.”54
If East Germany did not have to suffer through a series of show trials, other layers of terror reached into every neighborhood, household, and family. The Ministry for State Security was founded on February 8, 1950, with its officials usually referred to as the Stasi, short for Staatssicherheit (state security). Soviet occupation authorities had established a secret police almost as soon as they arrived, and like those everywhere in Eastern Europe, it was modeled on Cheka. It grew like a cancer, until a month before the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989, when the Stasi had 91,015 full-time employees and 174,000 informants. Translated into everyday life, that number meant that for every fifty citizens, one person worked for the Stasi. It became notorious both for its size and the scope of its activities.55