The Modern Inquisition. Hugo Dewar 1953

Chapter X: The ‘Chistka’ Continues

The confession trials in Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia are outstanding examples of the use of the Moscow technique for the purpose of intimidation, propaganda and the legal assassination or other effective removal from politics of all who constituted a danger to the Russification of the Eastern European countries. It is hardly necessary to insist on the centrally directed nature of this campaign. As early as June 1945 Polish leaders representing various political parties were lured by false promises on to Soviet soil, there arrested, subjected to the interrogation technique and put on trial for directing ‘subversive activities against the Red Army and the Soviet Union, the perpetration of terroristic acts... the organisation of sabotage’ and so forth (Trial of the Polish Diversionists, Hutchinson, 1945). The testimony of one of the accused, Zbigniew Stypulkowski, regarding the ‘preliminary examination’ has already been quoted in an earlier chapter. The international situation at that time, the fact that Russia was not then prepared to reveal its final aims in Poland, created a less unfavourable atmosphere for the accused than has since been the case, and nearly all of them made reservations in pleading guilty to part of the charges, while one, Stypulkowski, pleaded not guilty. The accused did not lend themselves wholeheartedly to the propaganda requirements of the Soviet government, and the report of the trial gives a quite unusual impression of solidarity between them. All these accused had had long and recent experience of underground activity against the Nazis and it is obvious from the report that they were too tough, and too conscious of a common loyalty, to be completely broken in the time at the disposal of the examiners, which was limited by considerations arising from international negotiations then proceeding. This trial was therefore not a really finished example of a confession trial, although the methods employed were the same as in all other instances, just as was the aim pursued. [1]

In Rumania the Stalinist leader Gheorghiu-Dej gave a further indication of the common inspiration of this campaign. Returning from a visit to Sofia, he made a speech to his followers (17 July 1947), in the course of which he said:

We also decided at Sofia to intensify our fight against the enemies of democracy and for the liquidation of the remnants of fascism and of reactionary forces — both in Bulgaria and Rumania... The arrest of Maniu is not enough. We must strike mercilessly at all those who rallied round the flag of Maniu. The National Peasant Party, led by the traitor Maniu, must be dissolved and this step will be taken in accordance with the obligations to which Rumania affixed her signature in Paris.

(In passing, it may be suggested that Western diplomats were a little naive in not defining what was meant by ‘fascist’ or ‘reactionary’, or at least in not laying down what parties could not be so called.)

When Gheorghiu-Dej visited Sofia, Petkov was under arrest and awaiting trial. In Rumania Maniu had also been arrested; he was in due course tried and sentenced to life imprisonment. At his trial he was defended by one of his political adversaries, a Mr Paraschivescu-Balaceanu, founder of a Stalinist ‘front’ organisation, the National Popular Party (since dissolved). Whether Maniu was guilty or not of any of the charges against him, the authorities were as usual taking no chances. The well-known French lawyer Giafferi offered to defend Maniu, as he had once offered to defend Dimitrov at the Leipzig Trial, but he was refused a visa. Commenting on the case in a letter to the Rumanian Legation in Paris, M Giafferi wrote:

Maniu was given four days to study his dossier. This, you say, is a legal term; very well; but why not mention that this dossier consisted of eighteen volumes! I quote from my source, a telegram by France-Presse, no 90, dated 26 October. Maniu requests the time needed for the examination of such a bulky file. He was granted four days. This is a mockery... You say that five among the accused have themselves selected the attorneys for their defence. This is true: five out of fifteen. And even among these five, there was a son or a brother who did not hesitate to put on the robe on behalf of his relative. Must one require so much courage in the exercise of our ministry? And what is one to think of an environment where the fulfilment of the simplest of duties becomes an heroic act? Five of the fifteen. The other accused are compelled to accept defence attorneys appointed ex-officio because my colleagues in Bucharest felt repugnance [towards the accused]. It is you who pronounce this word. I pity those who agreed to invoke it as an excuse... You invoke reasons of state... but do not forget that in France the attorneys for the defence of Louis XVI were Malesherbes and Déséze and that during the most tragic hours of the Terror there was not a single accused who could not find a defender freely chosen and who was not able to speak freely.

The ‘son or brother’ above referred to was a Mr G Serdici, who defended his father. He was later compelled to flee from Rumania. Of his father’s confession at the trial he said:

His astounding confessions would have been undoubtedly better understood by you if you had been subjected yourself to examination by the MVD agents known at the Rumanian Security Police under the name of Petrescu and Misha. It was these two who were charged with the examination of Mr Maniu and my father... I would also remind you that the same examining agents were seated at the stenographers’ table during the trial, permanently facing the accused...

This Petrescu mentioned by Serdici was a war-time director of Rumanian prisons and concentration camps. Yves C Frank, former Bucharest correspondent of the Swiss Journal de Genčve, wrote about this man in an article in the New York Herald Tribune (7 November 1947):

I was arrested in February 1941 for pro-Allied activity... Other men were there whom I scarcely knew, but the fact that their feet were chained made it clear to me that they had just been condemned to death, all accused of possessing explosives and of Communist activity. They were the so-called Paneth group, whose wives had been condemned with them. Their judge had been Colonel Alexandre Petrescu. The next time I heard of Petrescu was when he condemned to death a Greek named George Sarandos, accused by the Gestapo of the murder of General Doehring on 19 January 1941...

Not long afterwards Petrescu was appointed director-general of all prisons and concentration camps in areas of the Soviet Union occupied by the Rumanian Army. A few weeks before 23 August 1944, when the coup d'état ousted Antonescu and put Rumania on the Allied side, Petrescu was removed from his post. Later Frank saw him in the antechamber of the Public Prosecutor, Alexandru Draghici. Draghici told Frank that he was investigating Petrescu’s past, in particular his part in condemning the Paneth group. Frank continues:

Not long after this meeting I received a telephone call from Dr Simion Oeriu, at that time Secretary-General of the ARLUS, the association for the improvement of relations between Rumania and the USSR. Oeriu told me that it was forbidden from that moment on for anyone to publish anything against Petrescu. I heard nothing more.

Shortly after this Petrescu became one of the instruments of Stalinist justice in Rumania. They know how to choose reliable men for this kind of work.

The argument sometimes advanced, that the measures of police repression taken in the Iron Curtain countries are an inevitable concomitant of revolutionary change involving the dispossession of the old ruling class and the establishment of the rule of the common people, does not hold water. The anger of an oppressed people in revolt against tyranny does give rise to excesses that are historically justifiable and humanly pardonable. However, in the countries in question the Communist Party was not swept into power on the flood-tide of popular revolt, it slipped into power by unscrupulous underhand manoeuvring, which was successful only because behind it stood the overawing might of the Red Army. That Russian military strength was the decisive factor in this conquest of power is not denied by the satellite spokesmen; on the contrary, they take pride in emphasising that but for the Soviet Union the ‘liberation’ of these countries would not have been possible. The Yugoslav Communists alone could boast that their power rested on a solid basis of wide popular support — their ability to defy the Kremlin is sufficient proof of their national strength. In all the other countries the ‘revolution’ was carried out from above, and events have shown the truth of the dictum that ‘those who would be free, themselves must strike the blow’. The People’s Democracies are neither popular nor democratic, and the measures of police repression carried out are not the expression of the people’s white-hot revolutionary anger against their former oppressors, but the coldly calculated policy of a foreign power operating through a native minority movement. The fact that the prewar governments of these countries had been more or less anti-democratic and reactionary and had consequently engendered varying degrees of popular opposition does not change the essential nature of the postwar policy pursued by the Stalinists. The overall pattern of events from the defeat of Nazi Germany to date makes it clear that the national interests of the Soviet Union constituted the touchstone for all political, economic and social changes. And running like a red thread through this pattern is the series of political trials, the scope of which continually widened, until they came at last to embrace even members of the Communist parties.

In the correspondence between the Yugoslav Communist Party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which preceded the rupture, there is a highly significant point touching on this question of political trials. It shows that already before Tito’s defection from the Stalinist camp an effort was being made by the Russians to extend confession trials to the Communist Party.

In the letter of 27 March 1948 (we quote from The Soviet-Yugoslav Dispute, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948) from the Central Committee of the CPSU, there is the following:

We cannot understand why the English spy, Velebit, still remains in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Yugoslavia as first Assistant Minister. The Yugoslav comrades know that Velebit is an English spy. They also know that the representatives of the Soviet government consider Velebit a spy. Nevertheless, Velebit remains in the position of first Assistant Foreign Minister of Yugoslavia.

The Yugoslav party replied to this point on 13 April as follows:

As to Velebit and why he still remains in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The matter stands thus. Kardelj and Djilas once told Molotov that we are not at all clear about Velebit, we never had any proof then and we have none today. The matter is still under investigation and we would not care to remove and destroy a man on the basis of suspicion. What induces us not to be too hasty with Velebit is, first, that he has been a member of the party since 1933 and before that he did great services for the party. In 1940 Tito gave him the confidential task of renting a villa in Zagreb in his name in which to place the radio station of the Comintern, and in which Velebit lived with his wife as wireless operator. Velebit was at the same time a courier. All this continued some time under the occupation and of course represented a danger to his life. Upon the decision of the party, Velebit joined the Partisans in 1942 and conducted himself well. Later he received a task abroad and performed it well. We are now investigating his entire past. If the Soviet government has something concrete about him we beg it to give us the facts. [Author’s emphasis]

The Soviet government was unable to produce any facts, as can be seen from its reply of 4 May:

Actually, in their meeting with Molotov there was talk that Velebit was suspected of spying for England. It was very strange that Tito and Kardelj identified the removal of Velebit from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with his ruin. Why could not Velebit be removed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs without his being ruined? ... Why so much consideration for an English spy, who at the same time is so uncompromisingly hostile towards the Soviet Union?

In this disagreement over the question of Velebit it is the Russians who insist upon action. The Yugoslavs’ refusal to act against Velebit is regarded as a mark of insubordination. Those who are raised to leading positions in the satellite parties must have the approval of the Kremlin, which has the right to insist upon the removal of anyone it considers unreliable. The Yugoslavs were not deceived by the innocent-seeming question: why must Velebit’s removal automatically mean his ruin? Even if experience of Russian politics were not enough to show the hypocrisy of such a question, there is the menacing accusation that immediately follows it and cancels it out. Velebit is a spy — yet to accept this assertion and to act upon it does not mean the man’s ruin! How can one make sense out of this? From this alone it is clear that for the Russians the word ‘spy’ has a meaning very different from the one we give it. Velebit’s close association with the British government, as Tito’s liaison man during the Partisan struggle, necessarily transforms him into a spy for the English. But this is at once a serious matter and not a serious matter: the charge can be pressed home against Velebit or held in abeyance, according to the dictates of political expediency. But once the Yugoslavs had yielded on this question — even if Velebit had not been immediately ‘ruined’ — that is, tried and condemned as a spy — they would have admitted the right of the Russians to appoint and dismiss their leaders, they would have recognised their puppet status, opened their party to the corrosive influence of mutual suspicion, replaced the loyalty of members to one another by internecine intrigues aimed at currying favour with the Russian masters.

The Velebit incident also throws light on subsequent events in the other Communist parties. Velebit is called a spy. On what grounds? The Yugoslavs asked for the facts. The request is ignored. This was a matter of no importance to the Russians. Suspicion was enough for them. All one need do was to put Velebit through the interrogation mill and he would ‘confess’. Whether, as a consequence, he was to be tried and condemned would depend upon circumstances. But willingness to sacrifice him would be a mark of ‘loyalty to the Soviet Union’. This was the course followed in the Communist parties in all the other satellites. The guiding principle for the Russians was not whether there was any evidence against such or such a person, but whether he had given the slightest grounds for supposing that he might not be wholly subservient to Russian commands. If a Communist leader aroused the suspicion that he was not a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist the evidence against him could be manufactured easily enough. The Velebit affair makes this perfectly clear. The Yugoslavs’ refusal to sacrifice him was of course not a cause of the subsequent rupture; it was a symptom of the independence of the Yugoslav party.

Up to this point political events in Yugoslavia had justified the view that there was no difference between this country and the rest of the satellites. In 1947 and 1948 leaders of various opposition parties had been placed on trial and condemned to imprisonment, although no real confession trials comparable to those in Bulgaria took place. But in May 1948 it was announced that two Communist leaders, the Minister of Light Industry, Hebrang, and the Minister of Finance, Zujovic, had been removed from their posts. It subsequently transpired, however, that these two men had been arrested, not because they had a ‘Western orientation’, but because they had aided Soviet attempts to control the Yugoslav party. No confession trial resulted and one of the arrested men, Zujovic, made a statement on 23 November 1950 in which he admitted that he had ‘measured everything exclusively with a Russian yardstick, and that measure was not merely faulty, but was also a hostile one’. It can of course be argued that Zujovic was in jail for some eighteen months and the voluntary nature of his statement is therefore open to question; but no one who reads this most interesting and illuminating statement can fail to note a marked difference between it and the usual confessions in the show trials. Zujovic does not confess to treason, espionage, sabotage and wrecking, but simply to having mistaken Russian aims with regard to Yugoslavia; moreover his statement was accepted by the Yugoslav party and he was released from prison. Hebrang, however, did not change his views and died in jail. In passing, it must be pointed out that it would be a mistake to tar all Communists in Eastern Europe with the same brush and regard them all as mere bureaucratic careerists. These may now be the only ones to have survived; but there were once many genuine and sincere revolutionary fighters who displayed extraordinary moral and physical courage. They remained firm under the fiercest persecution during the prewar years, suffered torture, years of imprisonment, and even paid with their lives for their beliefs. Just as the careerists, but for different reasons, they saw in Soviet Russia their one true friend, a haven and a refuge, a source of material and — even more important for them — moral support. The hard logic of events disillusions them and they are consequently the first to become suspect in the eyes of the Kremlin. A man who is concerned only with his own personal interests is infinitely more valuable to them than a former hero and martyr dedicated to a cause. Yet even the careerist, becoming too ambitious or lacking sufficient manoeuvring skill, may also fall into disgrace.

The Yugoslav-Russian rupture did not initiate the Russian-dictated purges in the satellite parties; these would have come about in any case, following the Russian pattern of inner-party, post-revolution events. But the rupture gave the purge an urgency that it might not otherwise have had.

In Rumania, even before the Tito-Stalin dispute, the leading Communist Patrascanu, one-time Minister of Justice (relieved of this post in February 1948), was expelled for ‘nationalism’ and disappeared from the political scene.

Following the Yugoslav defection the Albanian leader, Koçi Xoxe, Vice-Premier and Minister of the Interior, Pandi Kristo, in charge of the important State Control Commission, and other leading Communists were tried in secret for plotting to incorporate Albania into Yugoslavia, for ‘anti-Sovietism’, ‘anti-Marxism’, and so forth. The Albanian authorities issued daily bulletins during the trial, purporting to contain the confessions of the accused. Xoxe was condemned to death and executed on 11 June 1949; and the others were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

The Polish leader Wladislaw Gomulka was also found guilty of ‘nationalist deviations’. Formerly Secretary-General of the party and deputy Prime Minister, Gomulka was dismissed from office in September 1948. In an effort to rehabilitate himself, he wrote a letter to the Tribuna Ludu refuting the claim of Djilas, Yugoslav Minister without Portfolio, that he was a supporter of Tito. ‘In July of this year’, wrote Gomulka, ‘I learned that Djilas, despite my resolute condemnation of the traitorous Tito clique, is attempting to count me among his supporters.’ This letter was quoted by the Soviet Monitor of 8 September 1949, citing a Moscow radio report. This would appear to indicate some hesitation regarding the best policy to pursue with regard to Gomulka. Inside the Polish party, Gomulka tried desperately to climb back up the slimy slope into the good graces of the Russians. He humbled himself; admitted errors, mistakes; admitted his doubts about the justice of the attack on Tito, and condemned himself for them. The Rajk trial had changed all that, he said. However, his ‘self-criticism’ only caused him to slide further down into the mire. In November 1949 the die was finally cast against him and he was expelled from the party, shortly after the arrival in Warsaw of Marshal Rokossovsky, Russian-appointed chief of the Polish Armed Forces. Whatever considerations may at first have made necessary a cautious attitude towards Gomulka’s ‘deviations’, these considerations evidently now no longer weighed anything against the urgent need to make Poland secure as a Soviet vassal. With Gomulka into the shadows went General Spychalski and Zeno Kliszko (Chairman of the party in 1948) and many others. But to date Gomulka has not been put on trial; he has in all probability proved too tough a nut to crack, to take a chance on another Kostov fiasco would be too risky for the authorities.

In Czechoslovakia the purge of the party was slow in getting under way. The popular strength of the party in this country, considerably greater than in the other satellites, was a major factor in compelling the Russians to tread warily. But in October 1949 twenty members of the Czech Foreign Office were dismissed. Most of these men had been in the West during the war years. This cleansing naturally reflected on the loyalty of Dr Vladimír Clementis, the Foreign Minister, whose past made him particularly vulnerable. He had been expelled from the party for opposition to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Russia’s aggression against Finland, and had, moreover, been a refugee in Paris and London during the war. Among those dismissed at this time was the head of the Press Department, Evzen Klinger, with whom Clementis had been on terms of close friendship. Contrary to The Times statement of 11 October 1949, Klinger had never been ‘a prominent leader of the Czech Trotskyists’: he had never been a member of the Trotskyist group, let alone prominent or a leader. It is true, however, that he was a Marxist and an opponent of the Stalinists. A prey to nostalgia, he convinced himself that it was possible to work with the Communists (his poor health — he was a sufferer from tuberculosis — probably affected his outlook) and he returned home, to the inevitable fate that his friends had warned awaited him there. It will easily be understood how the mere fact of friendship with such a man could end in disaster for Clementis, quite apart from his own deviations in the past. Clementis made Klinger’s return to Czechoslovakia possible and secured him his post in the Press Department, a fact that would not be overlooked by the Russians, ever ready to put the worst construction upon the most natural actions — in this instance one motivated by friendship and compassion. The fate of Dr Clementis appeared for a long time to hang in the balance, but it was only a matter of time before the blow fell. He was dismissed from his post in March 1950.

Prior to his dismissal the editor of the Communist newspaper Rudé Právo, Vilhelm Nový, was expelled from the party (February 1950). On 2 March the death by suicide of Milan Reiman, head of the Czech Prime Minister’s chancery, was announced. No details of this affair were given by the authorities, but his death came shortly after he had been arrested, accused of improper possession of state documents. It may therefore be safely assumed that he died in prison under questioning. (Jan Masaryk, whom Clementis succeeded as Foreign Minister, also came to a violent end. His body was picked up on 10 March 1948 in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry. It was said that he had hurled himself from a top-storey window to his death.) The agent in charge of the cleansing, Kopriva, announced that ‘Tito agents’ had been unmasked in the party: Reiman had been an agent of ‘Western imperialism’ and had delivered important secret reports to a foreign intelligence agent. But no public trial resulted and for a long time no more was heard of the matter. But in November 1950 Otto Sling, Secretary of the party in Brno, was arrested. After this there was a further period of silence on the question of treachery within the party, although a large number of trials of Western espionage agents took place and many death sentences were meted out. Then in January 1951 Clementis vanished from sight. He did not turn up for work in the bank where he had been given a minor post, and no information on his fate was available until on 27 February it was officially announced that he and four other leading Communists had been arrested on charges of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, ‘Slovak separatism’, ‘espionage for the West’ and so on.

The four accused with Clementis were Dr Gustáv Husák, former Chairman of the Slovak Cabinet; Laco Novomeský, former Slovak Minister of Education; Otto Sling, Secretary of the party in the Brno region; and Mrs Marie Svermová, widow of the Communist resistance hero Jan Sverma, and former Deputy Secretary-General of the party. (Otto Sling is, by the way, a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist; he was Political Commissar in charge of all Czech volunteers in the International Brigade in Spain during the Civil War, and worked under the direct orders of Russian agents, ‘liquidating’ those suspected of political heresy.) Besides these principal accused, other unnamed persons were stated to be in jail, implicated in the ‘plot’.

The stage was being set for a propaganda trial in Prague.

Before proceeding to a consideration of the latest developments in Czechoslovakia, mention must be made of the disgrace of two out of three of the top leaders in Rumania, Vasile Luca and Ana Pauker, and a number of other leading Communists (leaving the nonentity Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej as Stalin’s satrap, with no one near his throne). On 28 May 1952, it was announced that Vasile Luca, Minister of Finance, and Teohari Georgescu, Minister of the Interior, had been dismissed from their posts. On 30 May Ana Pauker, Foreign Minister, and Mr Radaceanu, Minister of Labour and Social Welfare, were expelled from the Politbureau. At first it seemed that the attack was concentrated on the ‘right-wing deviationist’ Luca, for Pauker, although deprived of her party functions, remained Foreign Minister. Up to June 1952 she was still being referred to as ‘Comrade’, and it was stated that ‘she had admitted some of her mistakes and pledged the plenum to fight for the party line...’ (Cominform Journal, 6 June). But on 5 July she was dismissed from her post as Foreign Minister.

The events would appear to foreshadow a Moscow-staged trial in Rumania, too. If it has been possible fully to rehearse the roles assigned to the principal accused, and if it has been considered expedient, the performance may already have taken place by the time this is in print. However, the reader will appreciate the impossibility of keeping pace with these purges and trials, the latest of which (up to the time of writing) we shall now examine.


Notes

1. See Zbigniew Stypulkowski, Invitation to Moscow (Thames and Hudson, 1951).