Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Among Bulgarian communists, as among the Poles, those who came to power with the Red Army and the MGB were at loggerheads with wartime resistance communists. At the end of December 1948 Georgi Dimitrov, hero of the Reichstag fire trial and villain of Stalin’s Comintern, had Stalin’s sanction to dispose of two men who had spent the war in the Bulgarian resistance, one of them the deputy prime minister, Traicho Kostov. Dimitrov had gone back to Russia to die and Stalin trusted only a Moscow Bulgarian to take over. Lev Shvartsman led a team of MGB men to Sofia, where they tormented Kostov and a dozen others. Interrogation records in Bulgarian and Russian were sent for Stalin to peruse. Some victims were economists trained in the West, and Stalin’s hatred of “specialists” imbues his comments: “The Kostov affair will help purging these agents and all hostile elements.” ³¹ Abakumov proposed framing Kostov as an agent of Tito, and Sergei Ogoltsov flew down with three regiments of MVD troops in civilian dress to draw up an indictment, which they did not even bother to translate into Bulgarian. Kostov was hanged in December 1949 and a thousand Bulgarians went to prison.

In Hungary Rákosi longed to be rid of his rival, Minister of Internal Affairs László Rajk, who had graduated from a Nazi concentration camp, not from the Comintern. It took years for Rákosi to persuade his Soviet masters, who doubted his sanity, to help but in May 1949 they arrested Živko Boarov, an attaché at the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest, and an American journalist, Noel Field, who traveled between Budapest and Prague collecting material for his articles and had in 1943 refused to collaborate with the NKVD. Field’s and Boarov’s interrogators in Budapest forced them to implicate Rajk as an American and Yugoslav agent but used such terrible tortures that the confessions they extracted were too wild even for a Soviet-style trial. Rákosi, like Stalin, wanted Rajk charged with trying to assassinate him and asked Andrei Vyshinsky and Stalin for a Yugoslav prisoner as an additional witness.³² Soviet advisers reined back the Hungarian torturers and Rajk admitted to being a fascist for twenty years and a Yugoslav agent for ten. Abakumov wrote the indictment for Rákosi; Rákosi and Stalin then hammered out a draft for TASS. On September 22, 1949, Stalin wrote to Rákosi: “I consider that L. Rajk must be executed since any other sentence won’t make sense to the people.” Rajk and two others were hanged; over a hundred others imprisoned.

Rákosi’s fertile imagination concocted for Stalin a list of over 500 communists of all nationalities from Austrian to Australian but mostly Czechs and Slovaks to be repressed. Rákosi asked the Poles to try Gomułka. He asked the Czech leader, Gottwald, to arrest all Czech communists who had lived in the West. Polish and Czechoslovak secret policemen collected Rákosi’s dossiers from Budapest. The Poles merely dismissed Gomułka; the Czechoslovaks asked Moscow to send them the advisers who had worked so well in Bulgaria.

Klement Gottwald was no more anxious than Bierut to arrest his ministers but was more cowardly; the Soviet MGB men had to find a Czech equivalent to Rajk. Preliminary arrests under Abakumov’s instructions soon brought the necessary “evidence.” Gottwald was happily imprisoning and murdering social democrats, but extending the purge to “cosmopolitan” communists created in Prague from 1949 to 1952 an atmosphere grimmer than anywhere else in eastern Europe. By February 1951, sixty Czech and Slovak communists were in prison. Gottwald knew that if he showed mercy or courage he too would fall victim to Rákosi and Stalin so laid down the lives of his friends to save his own. Rákosi and Enver Hoxha then began new purges; Rákosi’s own deputy János Kádár was jailed.