The Ghost of Rudolf Slansky

...Pavel Tigrid is editor of Svedectvi...

...And while Barak and his supporters were not successful in pushing through the publication of his commission's final findings, the incriminating material was safely locked in the files of Barak's ministry...

...What kind of an engineer of human souls was I, a man who poisoned them...

...Several days before all had been convicted of high treason, espionage, sabotage and military treason...

...In his summing-up the chief prosecutor, Josef Urvalek (now President of the Czechoslovak Supreme Court), "proved" that "the distasteful chain of willful acts and crimes" committed by Slansky and his comrades "links them with the treacherous gang of Laszlo Rajk in Hungary, of Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, of Kochi Dzodze in Albania, of Patrascanu in Rumania, of Gomulka in Poland...

...Italics mine...

...The more severe the punishment, the greater the warning...

...Nothing has been solved since Barak's fall: The Slansky trial still awaits final resolution, and the remnants of the bodies of the 11 Communists silently but irrevocably demand a formal reburial in appropriately identified graves...

...Recent events in the Communist bloc-notably, the expulsion of Matyas Rakosi and Ernoe Geroe from the Hungarian party for past crimes-leave little doubt as to the final outcome of the struggle in Prague...

...Noel Field, an American citizen and member of the Swiss Communist party, was tried alongside Rajk in 1949, but released from prison prior to Rajk's rehabilitation...

...Despite its late date, the Slansky trial was adorned with almost all the trimmings of the ritual of liquidation for which the Soviet dictator was famous...

...CZECHOSLOVAKIA 10 YEARS AFTER THE GREAT PURGE The Ghost of Rudolf Slansky By Pavel Tigrid Ten years ago, in the early hours of December 3, 1952, 11 men stood below a dimly lit gallows in a Prague prison courtyard, awaiting their turn...

...In fact, the Slansky trial had to be presented as part of an effort to destroy a brilliantly conceived "international conspiracy" against Stalinism...

...A similar picture presents itself in the Government, in the trade unions and several other mass organizations...

...Politically, Novotny could not survive either development...

...Many younger Party functionaries and most Communist intellectuals felt the "time for a change" had come...

...Even more significant, Novotny's February 22 speech was censored in its published version in Rude pravo, and a veritable tug of war developed as to the charges to be leveled against Barak...

...All had fully confessed their guilt...

...Several of the defendants, among them those sentenced to life imprisonment, were found guilty of treason and espionage committed in the services of Koni Zilliacus, "the most experienced agent of the British Intelligence Service," and R. H. S. Crossman, a "Jewish nationalist" who also was allegedly on the payroll of the "British Secret Service...

...All were topranking functionaries of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia (CPCS...

...Both sides knew a showdown was at hand...

...The Czech party's reluctance to "rehabilitate" Slansky is particularly striking because his trial was explicitly linked to both the Rajk and Kostov cases, as well as to the alleged machinations of the "criminal gang" of Tito and Gomulka...

...It is sometimes said that writers are engineers of human souls...

...Yet the small clique of unrepentant dogmatists that rules Czechoslovakia and seems to command a majority in the Party's Political Bureau and Central Committee is basically the same one which a decade ago was directly responsible for the liquidation of the Slansky faction...

...The defendants were made to acknowledge their alienation and their allegiance to "Zionism" (although none of them, of course, was ever a Zionist...

...after Wladyslaw Gomulka's release from prison in Poland...

...Nor has the pressure on Novotny been solely from the outside...

...Only in this way could its "ideological superstructure" be played up and a tie be established between the "intrigues of international imperialism" and the "criminal, Trotskyite gang of Tito...

...Ostensibly, the Barak faction was presented with an excellent opportunity immediately after the 22nd Soviet Congress in November 1961...

...with the aid of an informer planted among their adversaries they arrested Barak and eventually a number of his followers in various parts of the country...

...In principle, though, the Czech party crisis remains a political one, with economic difficulties merely providing an ever-ready lever for its re-examination...

...The Soviet leader was probably little inclined to rock the satellite boat at a time of strained relations with the Chinese and an open break with the Albanians...

...The only difference now is that rehabilitation of the Slansky group is inseparably bound up with revision of the Barak trial...

...Novotny himself has repeatedly boasted of his part in cleansing the Party of Slansky's "anti-Leninist" methods, and admitted that in the early 1950s his Prague organization was accused of "deviation" in its struggle against the Slansky-led political secretariat...

...And of course, in the manner of the better known Soviet trials of the '30s, the defendants spoke in appropriately self-derogatory terms, cheerfully labeling themselves murderers, informers, wartime Gestapo agents, men without conscience and country who were never good Communists in the first place, and who felt only hate for their own people...

...The defendants were divided into "Czechs," "Slovaks" and those of "Jewish origin...

...The anti-Novotny forces were headed by Rudolf Barak, a powerful and, within the Party, popular member of the Politburo who occupied the key position of Minister of the Interior in addition to being a Deputy Premier...

...This criticism, of course, commanded the support of the "liberals," who further insisted that forced collectivization of farms had, in large measure, led to the present lag in agricultural output...

...Finally, despite Novotny's promise that "new revelations" would be made as the investigation progressed, the political charges were entirely dropped...

...But what might have been praiseworthy and "truly Leninist" in the early '50s was thoroughly "antiLeninist" and even criminal after the 20th and 22nd Soviet Party Congresses...

...They never failed to assist the prosecutor by reciting their confessions from memory, using terms and entire sentences as they appeared in the Government's case...

...De-Stalinization was proceeding apace in the Soviet Union, and it seemed that Stalinists and "dogmatists" in the USSR and the bloc countries would soon be dealt a final blow in order to destroy, once and for all, their influence and possible support from other parties, notably the Chinese...

...The plain fact is that the "dogmatists" in the cpcs enjoy what Khrushchev, referring to the 1957 crisis in the Soviet Presidium, once described as a "mathematical majority...

...Barak and several economic planners in the Party leadership were considered able and willing to replace the "dogmatists...

...The harassed and still dispersed "liberal" forces in the Czech Central Committee and lower Party echelons are far from completely routed...

...And instead of being made the center of a new purge trial spectacle, Barak was tried by a Prague military court in three days of secret sessions (April 17-20, 1962...

...A check shows that of the present 147 members and candidates of the Central Committee, almost two-thirds are apparatchiki planted there by Novotny and his group...

...There followed reliable reports from Prague suggesting that Barak and his supporters in the police, security and probably also armed forces were themselves ready to arrest Novotny, on charges of "gross violations of Socialist legality" during the period 1951-53, dogmatism and circumvention of "collective leadership...

...Several of the defendants were kept in custody for over two years, Slansky himself for an entire year: It took that long to break down the resistance of some of the accused, and to prepare the indictment...

...But the "dogmatists" acted first...

...The charges originally made against him, as well as those leveled against his brother Herman in Poland, were subsequently retracted as fictitious...

...The front pages of the Party press were adorned with cartoons depicting the defendants as blood-stained savages, with crooked noses and scarce teeth protruding from under full Semitic lips, their fat necks squeezed by the strong, purely Aryan fist of workers' justice...

...As for Dzodze, Khrushchev himself offered what was undoubtedly an authoritative account of "Albanian justice" of that period in a speech at the 22nd Soviet Congress last year...

...On the basis of subsequent events, it is clear who raised the "irresponsible" demands: Without any previous warning, the Czechoslovak information media announced on February 9, 1962, that Rudolf Barak had been dismissed from all of his posts, expelled from the CPCS, and arrested...

...As a final touch of Stalinist justice, in their closing speeches the courtappointed defense counsels expressed their "horror" at the crimes committed by their clients and professed not to be able to find any truly extenuating circumstances...

...The trials of Rajk and Kostov were pronounced null and void in 1956, and the interment of Rajk's body took place in Budapest on October 6 of the same year, with some 250,000 people watching the proceedings...

...In a speech carried by Radio Prague on February 22, Novotny branded Barak a "political adventurer who nurtured careerist ambitions of seizing power" in Czechoslovakia...

...The reverse is also true: That is, the release of Barak and his return to power must be followed by a full rehabilitation of the 11 executed officials and those persecuted with them at the time...

...Little is known of this inner struggle, except that the first fullscale attempt to reopen the Slansky case finally failed early this year...

...The key charge of espionage, for example, was based on "irrefutable proofs" of the cooperation of all the 11 Czech Communists with several "Western espionage groups in the service of American imperialists" led by Noel Havilland Field...

...Novotny's meteoric rise to his present combined position of Party First Secretary (1953) and President of the Republic (1957) was only possible literally over the dead bodies of the Slansky group...

...The defeat of the Barak faction, however, was largely the result of two special circumstances: First, by timely maneuvering, Novotny cut off his critics from their only effective source of strength: the police and security forces...

...Andr?© Simone, formerly editor of the Communist daily Rude pravo, declared in court: "I used to be a writer...

...But in June 1961 the Novotny group, sensing danger, succeeded in ousting Barak from his greatest source of strength, the Ministry of the Interior...

...In a parallel move, the Czechoslovak information media launched an anti-Semitic campaign the like of which had not been seen since Goebbels' time...

...He and his wife requested and were granted political asylum in Hungary, where they have been living since...

...Nevertheless, the elimination of Barak and some of his supporters may still prove to be only a Pyrrhic victory for Novotny...

...For two months after Barak's arrest, Novotny desperately tried to force a full-fledged political purge trial, on the model of the Slansky case, at which "irrefutable evidence" of betrayal and anti-Party activity would be proved...

...The "liberal" elements in the CPCSgenerally younger men who were scattered in minor Party posts during the period of the "cult of personality"-soon realized they had only one good chance to expose the Novotny faction: by bringing about an investigation of the Slansky trial and public rehabilitation of its victims...

...Thus the ghost of Slansky and his comrades has continued to cast an ominous shadow over the CPCS leadership ever since Khrushchev's Secret Speech...

...During the court proceedings, carried over the national radio network, the 11 defendants (plus three other Party officials sentenced to life imprisonment) eagerly confessed to all the hideous and grotesque crimes of which they were accused...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that three months after Barak's trial the continuing struggle between the two factions came into the open again at an intra-Party discussion of Czechoslovak economic difficulties...

...Such an engineer of human souls as I should be hanged on the gallows...

...Asked by the prosecutor to wind up his final speech in court by "assessing himself," Simone replied: "I assess myself as a criminal I am of Jewish origin...

...A prominent Communist writer, Ivan Skala (now First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Union of Writers), published a violently anti-Semitic article in Rude pravo that called Slansky a "traitor and spy without a country," a man whose "shifting eyes, ginger-red hair and heavy eyebrows of a typical Judas" clearly showed that he was born in a "dirty nest of snakes which has to be exterminated unto the last of its brood...

...There are already signs to this effect...

...Conspiratorial activity within a movement as highly centralized and ideologically sterile as the CPCS is always a risky undertaking...

...Any new development in the Slansky or Barak affairs should therefore be watched as an indication of a weakening of Novotny's position, and the beginning of some measure of de-Stalinization in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic...

...They were even more eager to incriminate each other in order to paper over the numerous inconsistencies and blatantly incorrect assertions of the indictment...

...As Interior Minister, Barak came into possession of secret documents pertaining to the 1952 purge...

...At its head was Antonin Novotny, a rigid Stalinist, then an obscure but strategically well-placed secretary of the regional Party organization in Prague...

...Reporting on the commission's preliminary findings in June 1956, Barak offered findings which differed significantly from a report delivered at the same meeting by Novotny...

...Three months later the Soviet dictator himself died, and only four months later came the release of 15 Soviet doctors, most of them Jewish, accused of plotting and other crimes, in the well-known Stalinist pattern...

...Novotny himself confirmed renewed efforts within the Party for a revision of the trial when, at a November 1961 session of the Czech Central Committee, he rejected as "totally unjustified" the "irresponsible demands" for a rehabilitation of Slansky and company...

...While the First Secretary found no new evidence to justify Slansky's rehabilitation, Barak declared that "long after the fall of Slansky gross violations of Socialist legality were committed...

...P. T.) Obviously, the struggle was on...

...Indeed, it was this group that immediately moved into power after the arrest of Slansky and his comrades...

...Reflecting these prolonged debates within the CPCS leadership, reports from Prague at the beginning of July envisaged the early fall of Novotny and his resignation as First Secretary...

...In Czechoslovakia, moreover, the slow process of de-Stalinization plus a deteriorating economic situation (which was to reach alarming proportions in agriculture and food distribution) had helped strengthen the "liberal" forces in the CPCS and its Central Committee, and increased the unpopularity of Novotny's "old guard...

...But the Czechs remained adamant even after the dismissal of similar verdicts against Laszlo Rajk in Hungary and Traicho Rostov in Bulgaria...

...Eight of them were Jews...

...And the prosecution's case more often than not rested on the "fact" that the character and inner make-up of the accused-in other words, their being Jews-precluded any loyalty whatever...

...a Paris-based Czech magazine...

...In due course, Strouhal was able to weaken or render powerless Barak's considerable support in the police and security forces...

...The young man committed suicide soon after Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech on the crimes of the Stalin era...

...As a result, the Novotny faction has several times made attempts-often histrionic, occasionally hysterical-to cover up the facts of the purge...

...The question of responsibility for the troubles and shortcomings was weighed, and the Party planners and economists traced them to overextension in foreign aid and trade, unrealistically administered for years by the "dogmatists" under the banner of "proletarian internationalism...

...About the same time, the Albanian Party organ Zeri i Popullit reported from Prague on good authority that Barak's guilt as "a spy who sold State secrets in the service of the imperialists [will] doubtlessly be proved at the forthcoming trial...

...In addition, Novotny's fellow-Stalinist, East German Party chief Walter Ulbricht, could be relied upon to warn of the possible consequences in his country should the faithful Novotny be ousted...

...Indeed, for many in and out of the Party he now represents a real political alternative to Novotny's compromised and sterile leadership...

...Gomulka was given the job of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish party, instead of the rope the Czech party was ready to bestow on him...

...But Novotny has once more succeeded in dispersing the gathering storm clouds...

...Nobody with any integrity took the shallow charges against him seriously...

...and after official Russian admission that Tito's post-1948 "criminal" antiSoviet plottings were only figments of Stalin's imagination...

...Revelations of Stalin's judicial and other crimes could be precisely paralleled in Prague by similar revelations about the Slansky purge...

...But this accusation was never mentioned in the Czech press...

...Since "bourgeois cosmopolitanism" was in vogue during the last years of Stalin's life as a charge well suited to convicting Jewish purge victims, the CPCS leaders, their appetite whetted by the "doctors' plot," staged a veritable Nazi-type spectacle at the Slansky trial...

...The two Englishmen, both Labor MPs, not only denied the charges as ridiculous, but their disclaimers were later accepted by the CPCS...

...The preliminary June demotion of Barak enabled Novotny to exclude him from membership in the Czechoslovak delegation attending the 22nd Congress and, while in Moscow, to secure Khrushchev's support for himself...

...Both sides, of course, recognized its potentially explosive nature, if used at an opportune moment...

...As an added stratagem, the organizers of the Slansky trial published a letter written by the teenaged son of one of the accused demanding the death penalty for his father, this "monster who does not deserve the name of a human...

...Over the years an opposition group formed within the Czech Central Committee, and it found some sympathy in the Politburo as well...

...Such was the macabre end of the case, but not of the history, of Rudolf Slansky, Secretary General and the most powerful man in the CPCS during the late 1940s and early '50s, and of the comrades tried with him in the last full-fledged purge trial of the Stalin era...

...After his return from the June Moscow session of COMECON and a private conference with Khrushchev, he was able to strike a compromise: The Central Committee gave both the "dogmatists" and the "planners" in the Party a quasi-equal chance to show what they can do to improve the country's economic situation within the framework of broader bloc planning...

...According to the same sources, Novotny was to be arrested on his way to a Central Committee session...

...Moreover, since Stalin's death in 1953, still other evidence has come to light which completely refutes the original accusations of the Czech purge...

...Now look at me...

...In the opinion of the Barak faction, that moment arrived early in 1961...

...Even in prison, Barak constitutes a threat to the "dogmatists...

...Second, Novotny's careful strengthening of his supporters on all levels of the Party apparatus throughout the past 10 years has paid rich dividends...

...He was declared guilty of misappropriating State funds and sentenced to 15 years in prison...

...Taken by surprise, the assembled Central Committee voted the banishment of Barak...

...The overwhelmingly Stalinist character of the 1952 Czech purge should itself have sufficed to bring about an annulment or at least a reassessment of the Slansky trial following Khrushchev's disclosures at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party...

...Late in 1954, too, he was head of a Party-sponsored commission charged with a re-examination of the Slansky affair...

...Although he retained his Politburo membership and his post as Deputy Premier, Barak was replaced as Interior Minister by Lubomir Strouhal, a Novotny supporter...

...Ten years after the deed, the plain truth, supported by a wealth of evidence from Communist sources, is that the Slansky trial amounted to judicial murder...