The Power of Freedom. Mart Laar

once upon a time.’ The show trials were mostly instigated and sometimes orchestrated by the Kremlin or even Stalin himself, as they had been in the earlier Moscow Trials. These high-ranking party show trials included those of Koçi Xoxe in Albania and Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria, who were purged, arrested and executed. In Romania, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca were arrested and Pătrăşcanu later executed. Stalin’s NKVD emissary coordinated with the Hungarian General Secretary Mátyás Rákosi in order to determine how the show trial of the Hungarian Foreign Minister László Rajk, who was later executed, should play out. The Rajk trials led Moscow to warn Czechoslovakia’s parties that enemy agents had penetrated high into the party ranks and when the puzzled Czech Communist leaders Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald enquired as to what they could do, Stalin’s NKVD agents arrived to help prepare trials. The Czechoslovakian party subsequently arrested Slánský himself, Vladimír Clementis, Ladislav Novomeský and Gustáv Husák. Slánský and eleven others were convicted of being ‘Trotskyist-Zionist-Titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors’ in one series of show trials, after which they were executed and their ashes mixed with material being used to fill roads on the outskirts of Prague. After the trials, the property of the victims was sold off cheaply to surviving prominent individuals; the wife of a future leader of the party, Antonín Novotný, bought Clementis’ china and bedclothes. The Soviets generally directed show trial methods throughout the Eastern Bloc, including a procedure whereby any means could be used to extract confessions and evidence from leading witnesses, including threats to torture the witnesses’ wives and children. Generally, the higher the rank of the party member, the harsher the torture that was inflicted upon him. In the case of the show trial of the Hungarian Interior Minister János Kádár, who one year earlier had attempted to force a confession out of Rajk in his show trial, he was badly beaten and then ‘two henchmen pried Kádár’s teeth apart, and the colonel, negligently, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, urinated into his mouth’. As in Moscow in 1937, the trials were ‘shows’, with each participant having to learn a script and conduct repeated rehearsals before the performance. In the Slánský trial, when the judge skipped one of the scripted questions, the better-rehearsed Slánský answered the one which should have been asked. Some years earlier, most of the people now on trial had themselves eliminated their political opponents and tortured and killed people; they therefore knew exactly what awaited them. This made them ready to play their ‘roles’ in the trials. The only exception was the popular Bulgarian Communist, Kostov, who retracted his confession and refused to admit his guilt. The public broadcast went silent and the trial was finished without Kostov. In Poland, Romania and the GDR, where the Communist parties were less well established, the purges were less severe.67

      Stalin used Yugoslavia, where the local Communists had split with Moscow and gone their own way, as an excuse for the purges. Even though some tensions were felt between Moscow and the independent-minded Yugoslavian partisan leaders during the initial years of the Second World War, Tito was a good pupil of Stalin’s in the immediate aftermath of the Communist takeover. The Soviets took the Yugoslavian economy under control, pressing Yugoslavia to sell goods to the Soviet Union at low prices which might, in an open market, have fetched high prices in hard currencies. Moscow, in its assumption of economic and cultural dominance, and in its efforts to infiltrate its agents into the Yugoslavian Communist Party, assumed that it should treat Yugoslavia no differently from the other satellite countries.68 It was wrong. The Yugoslavian leaders felt themselves to be strong; they did not need the Soviet Union to stay in power and were not ready to buckle to Soviet authority. Soviet-Yugoslavian relations deteriorated quickly and in 1948, the Yugoslavian Communist Party was expelled from the Cominform. Stalin ordered his satellite countries to start preparations for the military invasion of Yugoslavia. The assumption in Moscow was that once it was known that he had lost Soviet approval, Tito would collapse; ‘I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,’ Stalin remarked. However, as Khrushchev was reported to have said afterwards, ‘Stalin could shake his finger or any other part of his anatomy he liked, but it made no difference to Tito.’ Tito quickly eradicated any Soviet-supported opposition in his party, arresting and executing many of them and interning thousands of people in a fearsome concentration camp established on the island of Goli Otok. Tito turned for help to Western powers who were immediately ready to include Yugoslavia in their assistance programmes. As Stalin’s attempts to bring down Tito repeatedly ended in failure, the Soviet-Yugoslavia split became a heavy blow to Stalin’s authority.69

      In order to combat the Western conspiracy and ‘Titoism’, all spheres of public and, as far as was possible, individual life had to be brought under the control of the Communist party and the secret police. Civic and political liberties were abolished, church and religion suppressed. For the Communists, the Church was one of the major obstacles to the imposition of the Soviet model and so its influence had to be eradicated.70 Some churches were actually more equal than others, in particular the Russian Orthodox Church that had been purged by Stalin decades earlier and brought under absolute control. At the same time, the most active measures were taken against the Uniate Church and Constantinople Orthodox churches. The Uniate Church was totally abolished in Ukraine and suppressed with particular force in Romania. Any priests or bishops who refused to sign their acceptance of a merger with the Orthodox Church were arrested and some of them were gunned down.71 In 1948, the Communist regime passed a law pushing for the dissolution of the Eastern-Rite Catholic Church. In Bulgaria, the first purge of the Orthodox Church came in 1948, when the head of the church was forced to retire into ‘voluntary exile’. In 1949, representatives of the Evangelist Church were sentenced to life imprisonment, while in 1952, several trials were held against ‘agents from the Vatican’, with many Catholic priests being imprisoned and four of them executed.72

      The Catholic Church was also actively persecuted in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The Communists’ strategy was simple: first, break down the Church’s institutional network and cut its lifeline to Rome, then undermine its control through a combination of legal restrictions and infiltration of whatever remained. In Czechoslovakia, Archbishop Josef Beran, one of the leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance who had survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, and all the other bishops in the country were interned or imprisoned. Religious seminars were closed and orders banned, the Church’s schools were closed and its land holdings confiscated.73 In Poland in 1953, the Communists went so far as to confer upon the state the authority to appoint and remove both priests and bishops. Cardinal Primate Wyszyński refused to obey and protested the order, which led to his arrest. By the end of 1955, over 2,00 °Catholic activists, among them 8 bishops and 900 priests, were imprisoned.74 The same also happened in Hungary, where leaders of the Catholic Church were imprisoned. The 58-year old Cardinal-Primate of Hungary, József Mindszenty, has recalled how he was tortured by the Communists:

      ‘The tormentor raged, roared and in response to my silence took the instruments of torture into his hands. This time he held a truncheon in one hand, a long sharp knife in the other. And then he drove me like a horse, forcing me to trot and gallop. The truncheon lashed down on my back repeatedly – for some time without a pause. Then we stood still and he brutally threatened: “I’ll kill you, by morning I’ll tear you to pieces and throw the remains of your corpse to the dogs or into the canal. We are the masters here now”. 75

      All aspects of cultural life were also brought under strict control and subject to censorship. The only official model of art – literature, painting and sculpture – was that which conformed to the Marxist canon. Artists of that period were obliged to follow the rules of socialist realism. ‘Decadent’ Western culture was prohibited, as was jazz or rock music. Intellectuals were closely scrutinised and controlled by the secret police, and each work of art was evaluated and censored on the basis of its compliance with the official canon. Just as in Nazi Germany, works deemed ‘inappropriate’ were either destroyed – books were burned or pulped,

67

Crampton 1997, pp. 261-266.

68

Gyorgy and Rakowska-Harmstone 1979, pp. 213-244.

69

Mastny, pp. 30-40; Crampton, pp. 247-261.

70

Weigel 1992.

71

Handbook, p. 306.

72

Handbook, p. 73.

73

Weigel 1992, pp. 166-170.

74

Kemp-Welch 2008, pp. 44-46.

75

Weigel 1992, p. 222.