Links with Tito were used as arguments to demonstrate the political unreliability of certain East European leaders (e.g., László Rajk in Hungary, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and had maintained friendly relations with members of Tito’s entourage). It is worth discussing in this context the analysis of forced confessions proposed by Erica Glaser Wallach, Noel Field’s foster daughter, whose parents were members of the medical units associated with the International Brigades in Spain:
That depends on you, confess your crimes, cooperate with us, and we shall do anything in our power to help you. We might even consider letting you go free if we are satisfied that you have left the enemy camp and have honestly contributed to the cause of justice and progress. We are no man-eaters, and we are not interested in revenge. Besides you are not the real enemy; we are not interested in you but in the criminals behind you, the sinister forces of imperialism and war. You do not have to defend them; they will fight their own losing battle. People like you we want to help—and we do frequently—to find their way back to a normal life and a decent place in society…. You want to know what a capitalist snake looks like? Take a look at her, at that bag of filth standing over there. You will never see such a low and abominable creature…. Take that dirty smile off your face, you American stooge…. You are a prostitute! That’s what you are. Worse than that: prostitutes sell only their bodies: you sold your soul. For American dollars, stinking American dollars.70
Domesticism, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, was an exaggerated if frequently unconscious “preoccupation with local, domestic communist objectives, at the expense of broader, international Soviet goals.”71 It was not an elaborated philosophy of opposition to Soviet hegemony, but a conviction on the part of some East European leaders, like Gomułka in Poland, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu in Romania, and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, that national interests were not necessarily incompatible with the Soviet agenda and that such purposes could therefore be pursued with impunity. Henceforth, the Cominform’s main task—if not its only task—was to suppress such domestic ambitions. The fulfillment of the Stalinist design for Eastern Europe included the pursuit of a singular strategy that could eventually transform the various national political cultures into carbon copies of the “advanced” Soviet experience. Local Communist parties, engaged in frantic attempts to imitate the Stalinist model, transplanted and sometimes enhanced the most repulsive characteristics of the Soviet totalitarian system. The purpose of the show trials that took place in the people’s democracies was to create a national consensus surrounding the top Communist elite and to maintain a state of panic in the population. According to George H. Hodos, a survivor of the 1949 László Rajk trial in Hungary, those frame-ups were signals addressed to all potential freethinkers and heretics in the satellite countries. The trials also “attempted to brand anyone who displayed differences of opinion as common criminals and/or agents of imperialism, to distort tactical differences as betrayal, sabotage, and espionage.”72 However, one needs to emphasize that these trials were not a simple repetition of the bloody purges that had devastated the Soviet body politic in the 1930s. Between 1949 and 1951 the main victims of the trials were members of the “national Communist elites,” or “home Communists,” as opposed to doctrinaire Stalin loyalists. Koçi Xoxe, Traicho Kostov, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Wladysław Gomułka, and László Rajk had all spent the war years in their own countries participating in the anti-Nazi resistance movement. Unlike their Moscow-t rained colleagues, they could invoke legitimacy from direct involvement in the partisan movement. Some of these “home-grown” Communists may have even resented the condescending attitudes of the “Muscovites,” who traded on their better connections with Moscow and treated the home Communists like junior partners. Stalin was aware of those factional rivalries and used them to initiate the permanent purges in the satellite countries.
In the early 1950s, Stalin became increasingly concerned with the role of the Jews as carriers of a “cosmopolitan worldview” and as “objective” supporters of the West. For the Communists, it did not matter whether an individual was “subjectively” against the system; what mattered was what he or she might have thought and done by virtue of his or her “objective” status (for instance, coming from a bourgeois family, having studied in the West, or belonging to a certain minority). While there is a growing and impressive literature dealing with Stalin’s anti-Semitism during the later years of his reign, there is a regrettable scarcity of analysis of anti-Semitism as a defining feature of post-1948 political culture in the East European satellites. In a assessment from 1972 of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, William Korey made an interesting observation:
Anti-Jewish discrimination had become an integral part of Soviet state policy ever since the late thirties. What it lacked then was an official ideology rationalizing the exclusion of Jews from certain positions or justifying the suspicion focused upon them. First during 1949-1953, and then more fully elaborated since 1967, the “corporate Jew,” whether “cosmopolitan” or “Zionist,” became identified as the enemy. Popular anti-Semitic stereotyping had been absorbed into official channels, generated by chauvinist needs and totalitarian requirements…. The ideology of the “corporate Jew” was not and is not fully integrated into Soviet thought. It functions on a purely pragmatic level—t o fulfill limited, though clearly defined, domestic purposes. This suggests the possibility that it may be set aside when those purposes need no longer be served.73
In Stalin’s mental universe, Jews were associated with the Mensheviks, but even more seditiously with the intraparty opposition headed in the 1920s by Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. While Stalin championed the interests of the Communist apparatus, the oppositionists were portrayed as reckless adventurers deprived of commitment to the building of “socialism in one country.” In the 1930s, in a famous interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Stalin defined anti-Semitism as a latter-day form of cannibalism. It may well have been that strong anti-Semitic feelings developed in his mind, especially after World War II, during the campaigns to assert Russian priorities in culture and science and restore complete ideological regimentation.
Timothy Snyder argues that the anti-Semitism in postwar Stalinism was tightly connected to the affirmation of Russians as the “safe base” of the regime after 1945. The starting point of this process was, of course, Stalin’s famous victory toast to “the Great Russian nation” just after the end of the war. However, as Snyder stressed, “war on the Soviet territory was fought and won chiefly in Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine, rather than in Soviet Russia.” But “Soviet Russia was much less marked by the Holocaust than Soviet Ukraine or Soviet Belarus, simply because the Germans arrived later and were able to kill fewer Jews (about sixty thousand, or about one percent of the Holocaust). In this way, too, Soviet Russia was more distant from the experience of the war.” In the operation of insulating “the Russian nation, and of course all of the other nations, from cultural infection… [o]ne of the most dangerous intellectual plagues would be interpretations of the war that differed from Stalin’s own.”74 The tragedy of the Jews in the Soviet Union