Stalin: A Biography

As the harness of repression was imposed, Stalin strove to increase the degree of dependable compliance. He did this in line with his lurch into an anti-Jewish campaign in the USSR after he fell out with the Israeli government.¹⁴ Communist parties were constrained to select a Jew from among their midst, put him on show trial and execute him. In the Cominform countries the sordid legal processes began and no doubt many communist leaders in the region calculated that action against Jews would gain them national popularity. Yet the ultimate verdict was decided in Moscow. László Rajk in Hungary, Rudolf Slánský in Czechoslovakia and Ana Pauker in Romania: all were found guilty without the slightest evidence that they had worked for foreign intelligence agencies. All were shot. Soviet penetration of these states meant that the Soviet embassies, the MVD (which was the successor body to the NKVD) and the Soviet Army directed high politics as they pleased. Only one country remained aloof from the scheme. In Poland the pressure from Moscow was to put Gomułka on trial as a spy and shoot him. But the rest of the Polish communist leadership, having incarcerated him, refused to apply the death sentence. Not everything in eastern Europe followed precisely the path drawn for it by Joseph Stalin.

But what was Stalin up to? Certainly he had it in for Jews from 1949, and his behaviour and discourse became ever cruder.¹⁵ But Gomułka was a Pole without Jewish ancestry — and the leaders who put him in prison included Jews such as Bierut and Berman. Probably Stalin was also moving against nationalist tendencies in the communist leaderships of eastern Europe. Gomułka had famously stood out against accelerating the process of communisation in Poland and insisted that Polish national interests should be protected whenever he could. But Rajk in Hungary, Slánský in Czechoslovakia and Pauker in Romania could hardly be accused of indulging nationalism. Probably it is foolish to probe for a particular set of political sins detected by Stalin. If the results of the show trials in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia are taken as a guide, then he surely had intended the political subjugation of eastern Europe.

The choice of victims did not much matter so long as they were leading communists. Until then the priority had been for the communist leadership in each country of the outer empire to persecute those elements of society which opposed communisation. The old elites in politics, the economy, Church and armed forces had been selected for arrest followed by forced labour or execution. The communist parties had had to infiltrate their members into all public institutions. They had to copy the basic architecture of the Soviet state and maintain close bilateral relations with Moscow. Weak in numbers in 1945, they had had to turn themselves quickly into mass parties. Their task had been to indoctrinate, recruit and govern in a situation where they knew that the bulk of their populations hated them. Yet they themselves had always been suspect to the Leader in the Kremlin. Before the end of the Second World War he thought them too doctrinaire and ordered them to try and identify themselves with the interests of their respective nations. Then as the basic communist architecture was established, his emphasis changed and he turned towards getting them to play down the national aspects of policy. Monolithism was to prevail in the Eastern Block. Total obedience would become the guiding principle, and an example had to be made — as Stalin saw things — of a few bright early stars of the Cominform.

The process was scrutinised by Stalin in the MVD reports he received from the capitals of eastern Europe. Tortures previously reserved for non-communists were applied to Rajk, Pauker and Slánský. The beatings were horrific. The victims were promised that their lives would be spared if only they confessed in open court to the charges trumped up against them. Here the expertise of the Lubyanka came into its own. Techniques developed against Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Pyatakov were applied in the dungeons and courtrooms of Budapest, Bucharest and Prague. Not all Western journalists had seen through the lies of the Great Terror of the late 1930s. The mistake was not repeated after the Second World War. The media in North America and western Europe denounced the trials. Stalin was rightly accused as the real criminal in the proceedings.