Iron Curtain (52 page)

Just as the Gulag began to close down after Stalin died, so too did Recsk cease to operate after the Soviet leader’s demise.
Garasin’s reward—or perhaps his punishment—for importing a Soviet-style concentration camp to Hungary was to become, in subsequent years, the Hungarian ambassador to Mongolia. His party files also contain pleas for help from his Hungarian comrades—he needed money for throat operations that could only be done in Moscow, and his pension was very low. On his seventieth birthday, someone wrote a letter recommending that the Hungarian Politburo give him a medal. Soon after that, he died.
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On the list of “enemies” that Bolesław Bierut sent to Vyacheslav Molotov in the spring of 1949, there was one very special category: “party members excluded from the party.” As 1949 turned into 1950, this category of enemy assumed far
greater importance. Across the bloc, communist party and sometimes military leaders became the focus of suspicion and
arrests, and then of show
trials. Hitherto loyal party members and decorated generals were “revealed” to be traitors or spies. Among the communists with long records of loyalty who now fell into this category were László Rajk, the Hungarian interior minister, and Gábor Péter, the founder and leader of the secret police; Rudolf Slánský, general secretary of the Czech communist party; Władysław
Gomułka, general secretary of the Polish communist party;
Paul Merker, leading member of the East German Politburo; and
Ana Pauker, the Romanian foreign minister. There would be
Albanian and Bulgarian victims too.

The spectacle of the revolution devouring its children was nothing new. Precisely the same set of obsessions had consumed the Soviet leadership in the late 1930s, the period of the Great Purge and the Great Terror. For the diplomats, observers, and journalists who witnessed them, the show trials of that era—featuring the humiliating confessions of internationally admired revolutionaries such as Lev Kamenev, Grigorii Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin—had seemed a grotesque spectacle, proof that Stalin’s mad drive for power knew no limits.
Fitzroy Maclean, a British diplomat who witnessed Bukharin’s trial, described these staged events as “fantastic public confessions, orgies of self-abasement” accompanied by the “bloodthirsty ravings of the Public Prosecutor.” One by one, he recalled, senior figures stood before the court, eyes glazed, and confessed to “a long catalogue of improbable misdeeds.”
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Book after book has been written in an attempt to explain the rationale behind the Soviet show trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938. Obviously they were intended to create political terror, but the timing, the methods, and the politics remain controversial. Theories abound. Long after he had fled East Germany,
Wolfgang Leonhard—by then Professor Leonhard—addressed the question in a famous annual lecture at Yale University, as a part of his undergraduate course on Soviet history. Among the possible explanations for the Great Purge, Leonhard listed Stalin’s insanity,
Russia’s historic fear of foreign invasion—and an outbreak, in the 1930s, of highly active sunspots.
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But in their way, the Eastern European show trials of 1949 and 1950 shed some light on those earlier show trials in Moscow. If nothing else, the very fact that they were carefully choreographed in conjunction with Soviet advisers and in close imitation of the earlier Moscow trials proves that Stalin judged those trials to have been a political success, a tactic worth repeating in his new client states.

Certainly both sets of trials marked similar turning points in the respective histories of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In both late-1930s Russia and late-1940s Eastern Europe, the party’s economic policy was failing, and the party members themselves were becoming disillusioned. The trials diverted the blame for manifold economic failures away from Stalin (in the 1930s) and the little Stalins (in the 1940s). Simultaneously they rid the party leaders of their most dangerous internal enemies by terrorizing potential
party opponents into silence. The show trials also served a public function, aside from whatever they achieved within the inner circles: like practically every other Stalinist institution, they had an educational purpose. If communist Europe had not surpassed capitalist Europe, if infrastructure projects were flawed or delayed, if food supplies were poor and living standards low, then the show trials provided the explanation: foreign spies, nefarious saboteurs, and traitors, posing as faithful communists, had hijacked progress.

Soviet secret policemen were involved in the Eastern European show trials from the beginning. A plethora of documentary and anecdotal evidence proves beyond doubt that officials in Moscow ordered the
arrests, helped choose the victims, and managed the interrogations. At the congress of the
Czechoslovak communist party in May 1949, Fyodor
Byelkin, the senior NKVD general in Hungary, took aside the Hungarian defense minister, Mihály
Farkas, and told him Moscow had “come to the conclusion that Rajk was the
rezident
[the spy chief] in Hungary of a European Trotskyist organization, which was in contact with the Americans.” This party jargon was a message that the “documents of the constructed trial were already being prepared.”
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In Poland, the fate of Gomułka was foretold in a memorandum of April 1948 prepared for Mikhail Suslov, the secretary of the Soviet Central Committee, entitled “On the Anti-Marxist Ideological Orientation in the Leadership of the Polish Workers’ Party.” The authors, three Soviet party bureaucrats specializing in ideology, complained of the “nationalist tendencies” of some Polish communists who “kept silent about the experiences and successes of the Soviet Union” and “ignored Leninist-Stalinist teachings.” They identified Gomułka as the leader of this tendency, contemptuously dismissed his notion of “Polish Marxism,” and complained about his categorical refusal to collectivize Polish agriculture. In fact, they suspected Gomułka of “right-deviationism,” another way of saying “Titoism,” which was itself another way of saying he might not be sufficiently loyal to the USSR. They feared the Polish United Workers’ Party might be moving closer to “social democracy,” and expressed great concern about the ideological direction of the Polish army, whose leaders were also never quite pro-Soviet enough for Moscow’s taste, even though General Roskossovskii was now firmly in charge.
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Having caught wind of these conclusions, Gomułka paid a visit to Moscow in December to argue his case. Afterward, he wrote his infamous memo (cited in
Chapter 6
), complaining that the Polish communist party had been taken over by Jews, and declaring that he had always seen the Soviet Union
as “the best friend of Poland” and Stalin as a great “teacher.”
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Despite these efforts, Gomułka’s closest colleagues were soon arrested—including
General Marian Spychalski, a fellow Politburo member—as were a large group of Polish army officers. Bierut kept Stalin regularly updated on the progress of their cases. Gomułka himself was finally arrested in 1951.
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Soviet ideologists prepared a similar document on the Czechoslovak
communist party, which they also sent to Suslov in 1948. Entitled “On Several Mistakes of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia,” this document is broader, more theoretical, and more rambling than the Polish equivalent, identifying deep problems in many spheres. But it does get in a few digs at Slánský, accusing him of having made mistakes in recruitment to the communist party.
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That document prepared the ground for Stalin’s message to
Klement Gottwald, sent via an emissary in July 1951, effectively ordering the Czechoslovak communist party boss to arrest Slánský.
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This was extremely awkward for Gottwald: the Czechoslovak communist party had just launched a national campaign to celebrate Slánský’s fiftieth birthday. A coal mine had just proudly renamed itself the Partisan Slánský mine, and other factories were clamoring for the same privilege.
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Not trusting their Eastern European colleagues to get it right,
Moscow sent Soviet secret police officers—Byelkin to Budapest and
Alexander Beschasnov to
Prague, where the local policemen had been resisting Soviet “advice” on this and other matters—to direct the investigations.
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They brought with them teams of advisers prepared to plan and orchestrate the
trials. In Prague, Beschasnov and his group all lived together in a suburban villa, where they employed four full-time translators and sent regular reports to Stalin.
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In Budapest, the Hungarian investigators were accompanied at all times by Soviet mentors. When a Polish officer arrived from Warsaw to be briefed by the Hungarians on their “progress,” he was struck by the presence of a red-haired NKVD general, recently arrived from Moscow, who appeared to know a lot more than the Hungarians about “the real motivations of the whole affair,” even though he said nothing directly to the Poles during their stay.
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The identities of the arrestees and the nature of their alleged conspiracies also fell in line with Stalin’s own obsessions of the time. Though the rules were not ironclad, certain types of people were more likely to be arrested than others. Potential “right-deviationists” and “Titoists” like Gomułka
were suspect. So were “left-deviationists,” also known as “cosmopolitans” or “Zionists”—in other words, Jews. As noted, this latter category of enemy had come to the forefront of Stalinist paranoia following the establishment of the State of
Israel in 1948, after which Stalin launched a broad campaign against
Soviet Jews. Jewish doctors—who were allegedly trying to kill or poison party leaders—would become one of the obsessions of his final years. In Eastern Europe, he may have had some more pragmatic motivations as well. He and his henchmen clearly believed, not without justification, that the persecution of Jewish communists would be welcomed by everyone else.

Communists who had spent the war away from Moscow, either at home or in Western Europe, were another target. Anyone with connections to foreign communist parties, anyone who had fought in the international brigades of the
Spanish Civil War, and anyone with family connections outside their own country were also at risk of being named a left-deviationist or right-deviationist. Rajk had fought in Spain and spent the war in Budapest. Merker, a Jew who waited out the war in Mexico, was another obvious target. Gomułka had spent the war in Warsaw (which was when Bierut had been scheming against him: as early as June 1944 he had told the Comintern leadership that Gomułka was not qualified to be secretary of the communist party and had asked for Moscow’s help in replacing him).
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The Soviet scenario was not always followed with precision. Across the bloc, leaders also played for time, altered the orders, and arranged both arrests and
trials in accordance with their own political needs. Gottwald delayed Slánský’s arrest until he himself was threatened. Gomułka’s trial was never held at all: although happy enough to arrest the popular party boss, Bierut never tortured him and never subjected him to a show trial, despite being under some pressure to do so. He may have feared that Gomułka would eventually emerge more popular, not less, from a show trial and he may have doubted whether his rival, in many ways the more confident figure, could be made to confess to imaginary crimes. Bierut may also have feared the long-term consquences of Gomułka’s destruction, just as Gottwald seems to have feared the long-term consequences of Slánský’s demise. Although neither man had any qualms about arresting and torturing priests or senior military officers, the murder of the general secretary of the communist party—the job held by both Gomułka and Slánský at the time—could be extremely dangerous for everyone else. Any one of them might come next, as one Hungarian
historian notes: “When the ax was directed at the head of the party, the move triggered within the other party leaders … a defense mechanism, aimed at self-preservation.”
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In East Germany the leadership had other reasons for hesitation, and in fact senior German communists were at first largely spared when arrests began elsewhere in the bloc. At the time, the
Allied Control Council still had a large presence in Germany, and events in Berlin were very much the focus of international news. Later on, after the official establishment of East Germany—the German Democratic Republic—a belated party purge began. A dozen-odd German communists were arrested, and several were eventually executed. But because both the Soviet and the East German leadership worried about how they would be received in West Germany, no public show trials were ever held. Aside from the possible bad publicity, the “success” of such trials depended on the creation and portrayal of a conspiracy, and there were too many German communists now residing in the West who would be able to pick apart a contrived “conspiracy” story and expose it as fiction.

Yet even countries that never held show trials did prepare for them, conducting arrests and interrogations under Soviet direction. As the investigations progressed, ever more international coordination was required. To be successful, Soviet secret policemen thought that show trials needed a complex story line, a conspiracy involving many actors, and so Soviet advisers pushed their Eastern European colleagues to link the traitors of Prague, Budapest, Berlin, and Warsaw into one story. In order to do so, they needed a central figure, someone who had known some of the protagonists and who could plausibly, or semi-plausibly, be accused of recruiting all of them. Eventually they hit on a man who fit these requirements: a mildly eccentric Harvard graduate and American State Department official named
Noel Field.

In his lifetime, Field was notorious. Since then, he has been described as an American spy, as an agent, as a double agent, and as a provocateur sent by the
CIA to cause havoc among the Eastern European communists.
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In his 1954 “rehabilitation” testimony—recently discovered by the Hungarian historian Mária Schmidt—Field declared himself, simply, to be a communist, working alongside the NKVD. A number of other documents now testify to that as well. Field wrote that he had been secretly working for the USSR since 1927, living an “illegal life completely separate from my official life,” and had been well acquainted with fellow members of the
American communist party, among them
Alger Hiss and
Whittaker Chambers.
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