A Last Service to the State

...In an important sense, the Czechoslovak government's initial attempts to cope with its criminal legacy were no less demanding than the crimes themselves...

...Volunteers for the Gallows, first published abroad in 1963, adds to the increasing number of memoirs describing the prison experiences of disillusioned Communists...

...Of course, the whole purpose of Dubcek's inquiry was to revitalize the movement by purifying it...

...Yet both commissions only tried to cover up as much as possible...

...The Soviet obsession with security, even if unjustified, is understandable...

...360 pp...

...Depending on the disposition of the reader, this literary genre may evoke indignation and admiration, shock and disbelief, plain sympathy, or disgust...

...These make clear that the Kremlin genuinely believed in the possibility of a Western military offensive and did not merely invent the threat as a pretext for its own aggressive designs, as was generally assumed in the West...

...It is a measure of the subjective insecurity of those regimes, ultimately a product of their illegitimacy, that they nevertheless refused to recognize the extent of their victory...

...for instance, was almost always accidental...

...Though unpublished at the time of the Russian invasion, the final report reached the West, where it was prepared for publication by Jifi Peli-kan, once the boss of the Communist dominated International Union of Students, later a prominent figure in the reform movement...

...President, regarded me as a saboteur and traitor and that this was the view of the Security personnel who, while my case was being investigated, represented the working people in my eyes, I decided that my ideas about myself and about what I had wanted to do must have been subjectively wrong...

...Charged with treason, he is subjected to interrogation and tortures designed to extract a "confession...

...Though most people did approve of the purge, it was not out of relief that "imperialist agents" were being weeded out, but in satisfaction over the mutual slaughter of the hated rulers...

...it gets to the heart of the matter by analyzing the system that generated the outrages...

...There are some indications, such as Anastas Mikoyan's statement at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, that the Russians subsequently realized their estimate of Western intentions had been wrong and had contributed to the deterioration of international relations...

...The book consists of the official report by Aleksandr Dubcek's special commission to investigate the political trials of the '50s...

...Whether he admits culpability or not, the victim is sentenced, imprisoned, freed after several years, and eventually restored to innocence in a conspicuously half-hearted fashion...

...Twice before Dubcek, in 1955 and 1962, the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee appointed a special commission to reexamine the trials...

...The document offers unique evidence of the thinking that motivated Eastern European Communists during the cold war...

...In each case a well-meaning, enthusiastic and unsuspecting Party member is arrested because of what seems to him an incredible misunderstanding...

...The question is especially tantalizing because other Communist regimes have so far not attempted to "overcome their past...

...Similarly, the awesome police apparatus established to combat subversion acquired an uncontrollable momentum of its own, for to justify its existence it was obliged to constantly "unmask" traitors...

...They found irregularities in procedure rather than in substance and even confirmed some of the verdicts, showing utmost reluctance to give justice to the survivors...

...From that day, believe me, Mr...

...But beyond the emotional pull, there is little in the ex-prisoners' intensely personal accounts to elucidate the deeper causes of their suffering...

...In a similar vein, the authors of the document try to rescue at least some of the reputation of the top leadership by advancing a dubious theory of "duality": The character of men like Gottwald and Antonin Zapotocky was good until 1948, but the contagion of the purge hysteria caused it to suddenly deteriorate...

...This is as unconvincing as the argument that the methods used by the Russian Bolsheviks to attain power are unrelated to their subsequent lack of scruples in its exercise...

...First of all, since the report was prepared by Communists for Communists, it devotes disproportionately little attention to other victims of the terror...

...He feared, with reason, that the revelations were so shocking that the Party's respectability, already severely eroded, might suffer irreparable damage...

...If the Communists had to find the enemy somewhere, unlike the Nazis they did not resort to the simple method of singling out as scapegoats a definite group of the population...

...After the 1968 commission of inquiry completed its work, its chairman advised against the publication of its findings...

...Indeed, the tone of the report is occasionally reminiscent of that exhibited by the Nuremberg judges toward the Nazi organizations and their acquiescent memberships...

...The authors assume that the "public" accepted at face value the official allegations about the conspirators' abominable crimes, and that the "mass" demands for severe punishment reflected genuine popular feeling...

...and accordingly I testified against myself as severely as possible the whole time...

...After Stalin's death he was released from prison and rehabilitated sufficiently to serve as one of the orators at the macabre reinterment of Rajk??an event that precipitated the 1956 revolution and the author's departure into Western exile...

...The precondition of the abuses was the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of an irresponsible oligarchy...

...Or, in different words, is not the Communist cure of capitalism much worse than the disease...

...All Czechoslovak archives??but, significantly, not the Soviet??were opened to the commission's researchers...

...Characteristically, when the second of the commissions met in camera in early 1963, its members tried to protect themselves from the judgment of posterity by deciding not to keep any minutes of their deliberations...

...Reviewed by Vojtech Mastny Assistant Professor of History, Columbia University Bela Szasz, a former Hungarian Communist journalist and high government official, presents a calm yet extremely vivid account of his ordeal during the Stalinist terror...

...Included, for example, are exchanges between the Soviet leaders and their Prague followers, particularly between Stalin and Czech Party Chief Klement Gottwald...

...The Dubcek commission's report reveals that in the case of less prominent officials, who were usually arrested first, interrogators sought to concoct conspiracies by collating the names of persons most frequently mentioned in their depositions...

...Since the Soviet invasion later dictated the suppression of the document, one can merely speculate on how the Dubcek government, had it stayed in power, would have handled the uproar that publication would inevitably have provoked...

...Arrested in 1949 in connection with the Laszlo Rajk pseudoconspiracy, Szasz was brutally tortured by his Party comrades in their effort to obtain false testimony...

...And when it is made again, its consequences may be great...

...instead they searched for targets within their own ranks...

...Szasz suggests that totally unwarranted speculations in the Western press about factions within the Party leadership sometimes provided guidance to the police...

...Devoted Communists, many of them confessed so as to render a last service to the Party before they died (for some, however, torture and promises of leniency were decisive in inducing them to follow the sordid scenario...

...And in response to the demand from above, the police then doctored the depositions accordingly and corroborated them with the victims' forced "confessions...

...It was left to the reformers of 1968 to ask the logical question, which the authors of the report put implicitly and the editor explicitly: "Is it possible, after all that has happened, to retain a belief in Socialism...

...The outrages against ordinary citizens, therefore, seem somehow less reprehensible than the persecution of Party members...

...An outstanding feature of the system was the interchangeability of tormentors and tormented...

...But quite apart from the merit or even feasibility of that undertaking, the commission was not as scrupulously objective as it professed to be...

...Thus the chief figure of the Czechoslovak trials, Rudolf Slansky, had originally been one of their principal instigators...

...But the report's most serious distortion results from imputing the delusions of Party members to the society as a whole...

...10.95...

...The commission's findings vindicate many conclusions made by Western observers about the dynamics of Communist regimes...

...Yet otherwise their paranoia was quite similar...

...at best, they have tried to sidetrack it...

...The very selection of the victim...

...For by the time the cold war started, the power of the domestic foes of the newly established Communist regimes had been all but broken...

...Yet in an area as conscious of history as is Eastern Europe, that attempt cannot be delayed indefinitely...

...President, I??who have been active in the working-class movement for 30 years??looked at myself honestly and mercilessly from the objective standpoint of the Czechoslovak working people and forced myself to see all my activity through the eyes of the investigators...

...For this reason, the volume entitled The Czechoslovak Political Trials 1950-54 is exceptional...

...On the eve of his execution, Ludvik Frejka, one of Slansky's co-defendants, wrote the following to President Gottwald: "When after four days I saw that you, Mr...

...Surely the majority did not believe that the Party's Secretary General was a Western spy any more than they did the other absurd accusations made during the trials...

...With commendable honesty, the Dubcek commission acknowledged the responsibility of the Party as a whole and of its members individually for abetting the outrages...

...On the most intriguing question of all, that of the defendants' seemingly voluntary cooperation, the Czechoslovak document supports the inferential explanation offered by Arthur Koestler...

...Yet typically he reaffirms, malgre tout, his faith in the abstract humanistic tenets of Communism that had inspired him for most of his life...

...Still, in the late '40s and early '50s that false perception was the principal cause of their frantic search, throughout the whole of Eastern Europe, for enemies within the walls...

...the vicious and bizarre nature of the ensuing witch hunt is not...

...Although its honesty and good will must be complimented, its product is not free from serious shortcomings...

...The Czechoslovak Political Trials 1950-1954:The Suppressed Report of the Dubcek Government's Commission of Inquiry, 1968 Edited by Jiri Pelikan Stanford...

...survivors of the purge, in fact, later admitted that they had approved of it before becoming its victims...

...he refused to comply and, a year and a half later, drew a sentence of 10 years' hard labor...

...The writings of such men as Szasz, Artur London and Eugen Loebl follow a certain pattern...

...A few of the most notorious interrogators received very mild sentences, while the politicians who had issued their orders received none...