Workers' Liberty 3/36: The Slansky Trial The Slansky Trial: the Slovak National Rising, and was elected CPC General Secretary the following year. introduction Following the CPC putsch of 1948, in which the non- CPC parties were driven out of what had previously Author: been a coalition government, Slansky was the most Stan Crooke powerful person in the country, second only in name to President Klement Gottwald. 2012 marks the 60th anniversary of the so-called Trial of the Anti-State Conspiratorial Centre led by The official celebrations which marked Slansky’s Rudolf Slansky. 50th birthday, in July of 1951, appeared to underline his grip on power. He was awarded the The Slansky trial: contents. Order of Socialism (the highest state decoration). An avalanche of the obligatory laudatory articles appeared in the press and his collected works were The Slansky Trial was one of a series of Eastern published. European post-war Stalinist show-trials in which leading Communist Party members confessed — But it would not be long before Slansky was playing after prolonged physical and psychological torture the lead role in a Czech version of the show-trials — to being longstanding agents of American which swept through Eastern Europe in the years imperialism. following 1948. But the trial also broke new ground. It was the first In response to the onset of the Cold War and show-trial in which state-sponsored anti-semitism the rift with Tito’s Yugoslavia in June of that played a central role. As the New York Times, year, Stalin had clamped down on the satellite reporting under the headline “Tragi-Comedy in states’ Communist Parties. The subsequent Moscow- Prague”, put it: inspired and orchestrated purges and show trials “There is something new in this latest trial. The sent out a warning to the leaders of the “fraternal” charge (is) that Slansky and the majority of his Communist Parties that any dissent was punishable fellow-defendants, who are of Jewish origin, were by death. members of a vast Jewish conspiracy... Here we have In 1949, the Albanian Interior Minister Koci Xoxe and the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but in Traycho Kostov, Bulgaria’s President of the Council of the Stalinist version. So the Prague trial is not merely Ministers, were executed, both accused of espionage a comedy; rather it may well mark the beginning on behalf of the US and UK. However, it was the of a major tragedy as the Kremlin swings further trial and execution in October of the same year of and further towards anti-semitism masked as anti- Hungarian Interior Minister Laszlo Rajk for being “a Zionism.” Titoite spy” and an imperialist agent which triggered Tags: what would become the Slansky Trial. In mid-1949 the Hungarian Communist Party The Slansky Trial: the General Secretary, Matyas Rakosi, provided Gottwald with a list of around sixty Czech officials who had rehearsals been named by Rajk’s co-conspirators as supposed collaborators. Arrests of whom began in November. Author: Initially, the interrogations pointed in the direction of Stan Crooke a show-trial of Slovak “bourgeois nationalists”, but At the centre of the supposed conspiracy was Rudolf later became focused on anti-Zionism. Slansky, a lifelong member of the Czechoslovak In late 1950 and early 1951 the arrest and Communist Party (CPC). He had joined the party at interrogation of another 60 officials was approved its inception in 1921 and been elected to its Central by Gottwald and Slansky. Around the same time Committee in 1929. a new — and much more imaginative — script for an eventual show-trial was drafted. In this The Slansky trial: contents. version Otto Sling (CPC Brno Regional Secretary) and Marie Svermova (CPC Central Committee Secretary) Elected to the Czechoslovak National Assembly in were the leaders of an underground Trotskyist 1935, Slansky fled to the Soviet Union after the organisation, recruited from CPC veterans of the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. He Spanish Civil War and CPC members who had spent returned to Czechoslovakia in 1944, taking part in the war in exile in London. 1 With the support of Slovak “bourgeois nationalists”, out Stalin’s instructions. As compensation, Slansky they had been preparing a coup aimed at removing was appointed Deputy Prime Minister. Gottwald, Slansky and Zapotocky (the Czechoslovak Tags: Prime Minister) from their positions of power. In February 1951 a meeting of the Central Committee approved a report on the plot, which had The Slansky Trial and by then been confirmed by the forced confessions “cosmopolitans” | Workers' from those arrested at the turn of the year. According to the report, Sling had become an agent of the Liberty Anglo-American intelligence service in the 1930s. In Author: 1948 he had been instructed to “develop nefarious activities (in Czechoslovakia) similar to Rajk’s in Stan Crooke Hungary and Kostov’s in Bulgaria.” The same meeting also marked the introduction of Sling’s plan was to convene a special conference of “anti-Zionism” (in reality: anti-semitism) into the the CPC at which his supporters would oust Slansky. preparations for the eventual show-trial. The report continued: “They already had a candidate in the wings The Slansky trial: contents. (Svermova) to take over the position of the General Secretary. This candidate had to know Sling as a While Gottwald made no more than a passing cynic, a thug, a criminal, and a murderer of his reference to the high number of arrested CPC own mother.... The party will therefore also treat M. members who “did not grow from the roots of Svermova without remorse as a criminal enemy.” our country and our party,” the party’s ideologue, Vaclav Kopecky spoke at length about the dangers of But even as this report was being adopted by the CPC “cosmopolitanism” and Zionism: Central Committee, a third script was being drafted. “Cosmopolitans should in principle not be posted In this version Slansky was not the victim but the in leadership positions. This truly is an issue of plot’s prime mover, and the ideological driving force cosmopolitanism, not a racial question. There are was Zionism. people of Jewish origin who are firmly rooted in our In March, the state security services in Moscow, nation. What we are concerned with here is those which received reports of the interrogations of people who are strangers to us, who are not true the alleged plotters in Czechoslovakia, identified internationalists... The people of this background Slansky as being responsible for placing “unreliable mostly come from very wealthy strata. In many persons and enemies” in high-ranking positions in instances they also had a very religious upbringing, the CPC and Czechoslovak government, and as the which only fortified their Zionist tendencies. possible leader of a conspiracy. Czech interrogators “Today we know that the attitudes of many people were encouraged by their Russian advisers — who of Jewish origin to the working class have changed... had begun to arrive in Czechoslovakia from late The Jews are drawn to Anglo-American imperialism, 1949 onwards — to accumulate more material which is supporting Israel and using Zionism as a incriminating Slansky. disintegrative agent within the parties of the popular The absurdity of the new role attributed to democratic regimes and within socialism.” Slansky was particularly obvious to those who Under Stalin’s instructions, on 23 November, Slansky had only recently confessed to involvement in the was arrested. The following day a meeting of the Sling-Svermova conspiracy. Svermova herself later Central Committee approved a report on the arrest recalled: which named him as the head of a Zionist group, “The same interrogators who used to call [Slansky] a consisting of CPC veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Bolshevik whom I and my faction wanted to eliminate Slovak nationalists, and CPC exiles who had spent now forced me to confess that I had always aided the war in London. The goal of the group was to usurp him in his criminal activity against the party and the power in Czechoslovakia. state.” In the meeting, Kapecky continued to lecture on the But the absurdity of the script did not prevent threats which cosmopolitanism and Zionism posed: the interrogators’ victims from making the required “Zionism has become a very serious danger in recent “confessions”. By the early summer the interrogators years. It has become an important instrument of had amassed a substantial collection of similar American and British imperialism. The international confessions, all incriminating Slansky. Despite such Zionist organisation is linked with the Jewish State confessions, Stalin held back from ordering Slansky’s of Israel. Advocates of Zionism figure that in the arrest. people’s democracies Zionism can be transformed He did, however, find that Slansky had been at fault into a species of Titoism.” in his selection of people to fill government and Another wave of arrests soon followed. Those CPC posts. In July Stalin told Gottwald that Slansky arrested were chosen for their suitability for a role in should be stripped of his post of General Secretary. the Slansky-led “Zionist conspiracy”, overwhelmingly Meeting in September, the Central Committee carried of Jewish origin. 2 The anti-semitic element of the trial became By the close of 1952 — just one year before the end increasingly pronounced as the script for the trial was of the first Five Year Plan — repeated pay cuts had finalised in the 12 months between Slansky’s arrest been imposed, even basic foodstuffs such as milk and the staging of the trial itself, part of the wider were in short supply, the chemicals industry was on pattern of anti-semitism promoted by Stalin in the the point of collapse, and energy production fell well Soviet Union and its satellite states between 1945 short of demand.