One morning at the end of November, 1952 a five-year old
Czech boy, Ivan, who was staying with cousins of his parents in Bratislava
while his mother, who had seemed exhausted and unwell, remained in Prague ,
wandered into the kitchen, a little surprised and disappointed that the usual
appetizing smells of baking were not noticeable. He found his grandmother’s
cousin and her daughter sitting tensely at the table, listening to some boring
official announcements on the radio. Ivan thought it was silly of them. Then,
in response to something said by the boring official announcer, they exclaimed
and clutched each other’s hands. One of them burst into tears. Ivan was
puzzled. “I thought someone died.”- he said and the women looked at him in
shock, then sent him away to play with cousins of his own age. About ten years
later Ivan realized that what he must have heard was the announcement that his
father, Rudolf Margolius, former Deputy Minister for Foreign Trade and one of
the defendants in the last Stalinist show trial, the Slansky trial in
Czechoslovakia, had been sentenced to death. Out of fourteen defendants, eleven
received the death sentence, carried out on December 3.
Three months later Stalin was dead and a period known as the
thaw began. The second, largely anti-Semitic Soviet purge was stopped, the
so-called Doctors’ Plot declared null and void and those medics who were still
alive released from prison. Prisoners from labour camps began to make their way
home; in some of those camps there were uprisings that were put down ferociously
and across most of Eastern Europe there began a process known as
de-Stalinization. As it happens, Czechoslovakia ,
whose “little Stalin”, Klement Gottwald died very soon after Stalin and was
succeeded by Antonín Novotný,
remained largely immune. The show trials continued though with considerably
less verve and there were no investigations into the years of what was later
called the “cult of personality”.
Romania decided to go her own way and ignore the fact that
Stalin was dead but in the other countries show trials were either stopped as
in Hungary where the “little Stalin” Mátyás Rákosi, himself a Jew, had been
planning a major anti-Semitic trial for 1953 and had begun the preliminary
arrests and interrogations or abandoned as in Poland where the main conceptual
trial as they were called never actually took place and the man who was to be
Poland’s Rajk or Slansky, Włodyszlaw Gomulka, was released. Indeed, many people
were released though some with their health permanently damaged by the tortures
they had endured.
One of those released, whose health had not been damaged, was
the American Communist, Noel Field. He had been a brooding presence behind the
trials and purges as the man who had allegedly created a vast anti-Soviet
conspiracy into which he had recruited thousands of seemingly good Communists,
most of whom had spent the war years either in their own country or in the
West, often in internment, Nazi prison or concentration camp, and not in the
Soviet Union. Kept in a Hungarian prison, he had not been tortured or put on
trial. On release he asked to stay in that country with his wife, also released
from prison, and was eventually granted Hungarian citizenship. In 1954, during
massive political convulsions in Hungary
there was a reasonably thorough investigation into the methods whereby the Rajk
and successive trials were set up and how the concepts were exported to
neighbouring countries. Noel Field gave an exhaustive account of his role,
which was only partially that of a victim and mostly that of a willing
accomplice, ready to further the cause through the death and torture of people
he had known well and many others. This extraordinary document was uncovered by
the Hungarian historian Mária Schmidt in the 1990s and thoroughly analyzed in
articles and in her book Battle of
Wits.
There is a phantasmagoric quality to the events of post-war Eastern
Europe and the process that culminated in the show trials. The Soviet
Union having liberated the countries in question from Nazi
occupiers or their own Nazi and pro-Nazi governments, had no intention of
allowing the development of a free democratic system in any of them. This may
sound like a truism now but was not at all clear at the time. Instead, the
states were either wholly or partially incorporated into the USSR
or had high Stalinism imposed on them. The process that took a couple of
decades in the home country was pushed through in something like half a decade,
with a considerably less willing population who had already had experience of
developed social and political activity before the war and tried to revive this
in the immediate aftermath.
Across a large part of the territory the war did not end in
May 1945; civil war and disorganized violence continued for several years. The
newly colonized countries were not only largely unsympathetic to Communist
ideas, but saw them, correctly, as foreign imposition administered by foreign
puppets. This could have been avoided if the Soviet officers and NKVD
administrators had listened to some of their local Communist advisers who
thought that there ought to be a national component to the new system. Instead,
a completely Soviet system was imposed not just politically but ideologically
with the Soviet Union seen as the true patria, making national resentment the
central focus of all discontent.
Nor did the Soviet colonizers ever really understand the
different geography. Used to the vast distances of their own country where
people could disappear with ease, they found it hard to comprehend that in the
countries of Central and Eastern Europe arrests, disappearances,
destructions of businesses and organizations became known to all and sundry
almost immediately.
By the late forties the process of subduing the economy and
society seemed complete but the dissatisfaction was as rife as it had been in
the USSR in the
post-collectivization years. There were serious shortages; life was hard for
most people while the party bosses seemed to have a much pleasanter life with
plenty of food and attractive consumer goods. The churches had been either
suppressed or co-opted; political parties disbanded and their members arrested,
tortured, tried and executed or imprisoned; other organizations were accused of
anti-Soviet activity and treated similarly. The anger and resentment was
palpable. The time had come for the conceptual trials – a mixture of bread and
circuses, apportioning of blame and intended final terrorization of population.
No-one, these trials were going to say, is safe. Not even good or seemingly
good Communists. But, in the meantime, we shall present a good show that will
explain who exactly is behind all those problems. Some of the more cynical
organizers of the trials understood that, as many of the victims had been
executioners, torturers and oppressors before, popular support for them was
likely to be minimal.
From 1948 on, while the United States was grappling with the
realization that its own government agencies had been infiltrated by Communist
agents like Alger Hiss, NKVD officers and their local stooges built up the
cases against Communists who were not, as it happens, dissident but who had a
less controlled biography. They had fought in Spain
or with the French resistance; they had been active in occupied countries; they
had been involved with Soviet espionage in the West. Many of them were Jews and
could be linked to Stalin’s “anti-cosmopolitan” purges and the new enemy, Israel ,
as well as the rebellious Tito. The so-called Moscovites, the Communists who
came to Eastern Europe in the van of the Red Army, were
taking over and getting rid of their rivals, the “local Communists”. There were
no ideological differences between the two groups or none that could have made
a difference; the deadly struggle was largely personal.
The divisions were not always clear-cut. Many of those who
had fought in Spain
had gone there from the Soviet Union and went back after
the Republicans lost. Those who survived Stalin’s purges either in Spain
itself or back home then went to their own countries as supposed “Moscovites”. The
Jews at the top of the East European Communist parties that they could be on
the victorious or the defeated side and could be either those who accused
others or were accused themselves of Zionism. Slansky, unlike Rajk in Hungary ,
was himself as much of a Moscovite Communist as Gottwald though his co-accused fell
mostly into the usual categories. Margolius was the odd one out for different
reasons: he had not joined the party till after the war but his presence among
the accused may well have been necessary to provide another economic scapegoat
as he had negotiated treaties with Western countries.
Thousands were arrested and endlessly interrogated until
they signed the requisite confessions. As so many survived and wrote about
their experiences later, we have a good idea of the sort of physical and
intellectual pressures they were under. The torture was horrific and many died
in prison. Threats to their families and promises of mercy were used as well as
the peculiarly Communist weapon of appeals to loyalty to the party and a
permanent feeling of guilt.
The outcome were three major trials, Kosto Trajev’s in
Bulgaria, the main conceptual trial of László Rajk and his “associates” in
Hungary in 1949 and the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia exactly 60 years ago in
1952. There were secondary trials which inflicted ferocious punishments on
other Communists. The population watched and listened with apathy, applauding
as required. What did they care who killed whom among the group that had been
doing the same to them for years?
Among the many accounts the best one is probably George
Hodos’s Show
Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, first published in the US
in 1988 and subsequently rewritten but with very few alterations in Hungarians
and published in that country. Hodos was one of the victims, imprisoned,
tortured and sentenced to hard labour at one of the secondary trials after the
Rajk case. He survived and left the country after 1956. His book is partly an
account of his own experiences and partly a carefully researched history of the
purges and trials across Eastern Europe .
The best known of the Czech accounts is The
Confession by Artur London, one of the three survivors of the Slansky
trial, which was made into a
film with Yves Montand in the main role. London
tries to work out what were the less obvious reasons for the confessions and
feelings of guilt. Of course, much of that had already been said by Arthur
Koestler in Darkness at Noon. There
are also books by families of the accused, notably one by the Heda Margolius Kovály, the widow
of Rudolf Margolius and one by his son, Ivan.
I started with Ivan Margolius’s reminiscences; let me end
with my own from several years later, when the system was falling apart. As
small children who started school in Budapest
in the autumn of 1956 we knew that things were uneasy but failed to understand
exactly what was happening. It was morning school on October 6 (mornings and
afternoons alternated week in, week out as there was insufficient school space)
and we were walking home at lunchtime. I knew my parents would be out and
somebody was coming to look after my brother and me. It was a grey day with
intermittent rain, which had stopped producing a sort of crystalline clarity
with the droplets in the atmosphere making everything look sharper and
brighter. There were black flags everywhere. We were talking quietly. Some of
us had been told that this was the first time for some years that the Day of
Mourning, the anniversary of the execution of 13 Hungarian generals in 1849,
was marked. Others had heard another name connected with the day: Rajk. My
parents had gone to the reburial of Rajk and those who had been executed with
him. (Slansky could never have been reburied as his and his co-defendants’
ashes had been thrown out of the car onto an icy road.) They had gone and had
stood through the macabre rain-sodden ritual because they knew that it presaged
something bigger. Just over a fortnight later, on October 23, they went to
another major demonstration. By the time they returned from that, the city was
in the throes of an uprising.
Dr Harshan Kumarasingham, the
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Potsdam and a past
contributor to the Conservative History Journal, gives his views on Edward
Heath and Philip Ziegler’s biography.
Edward Heath did not emerge, but was elected as leader of the
Conservative Party in 1965. The new
leader was young, experienced, and progressive with strong contacts with the
Parliamentary Party after an effective tenure as Chief Whip. Heath, the grammar school scholarship boy, personified a professional image that was accurately and purposefully
non-patrician. This was the man the
party hoped could beat Harold Wilson at his own game, sharing a greater
commonality and image with the electorate than any previous Conservative
leader. Heath could project a ‘modern’
image of someone who had risen through the ranks through ability not nobility. However, expectations of a new age under a
new style of leader were not unanimously idealistic. Heath carried significant pressures as the
new leader of a new era. The Economist reported at the time of
his ascendance as leader a sense of Conservative realism: ‘Mr Heath certainly
carries radical hopes in his baggage.
But in electing him, the Tories have primarily shown their instinct for
power. They picked, by a narrow
majority, the man they reckoned most likely to bullock their way back into
power. They will remain united behind
him just as long as his pursuit of power looks promising.’ The Shadow Cabinet under Heath’s clear
leadership had created a prepared and much publicised programme at Selsdon for
when it returned to power, which seemed to deliver the progressive hopes
envisioned by ‘Rab’ Butler Britain
This was a divisive era in the history of Britain Wilson
Alas for the country and Heath Britain Northern Ireland Rhodesia Middle East and the
sterling crisis confounded Heath and his ministers and their standing with the
Party. As Anthony Seldon points out, this was a formidable array of crises: ‘no
government since 1945 has been in office at such an awkward time’. Yet this
must be appended with Seldon’s pertinent speculation that ‘had he been a better
more inspiring communicator to the country and to his own party, Heath might
have made more headway in the unpropitious circumstances’.[1] The events were calamitous but the
leadership, the style and the method did little to dilute the dissent within
the Party. Philip Norton points out the
‘unprecedented level of dissent expressed in the form of votes cast (or not
cast) against the Government by its own backbenchers; historically high even
with the Europe debates excluded, there were still dissident votes cast in one
out of six divisions in the 1971-72 session’ for example.[2] The Conservatives required a leader that
could provide decisive leadership to rectify decline and propagate reform with
reassuring charm and creative presentation.
This was not in Heath’s capability.
Heath did not have
a predilection towards performing and this was exasperated during any crises
since he believed, from personal conviction, that the electorate and Party
would follow the right course – his course.
Yet unlike his successor Thatcher, who actively and forcibly sought to
convince those who disagreed that she was right or Macmillan whose
theatricality could elegantly cultivate followers towards his opinion, Heath
showed contempt at having to convince and persuade.
Ziegler adds little thematically to John Campbell’s
unauthorised (1993) biography, but he does, through his access to Heath’s
personal papers, give greater evidence of common arguments and intriguing
further information on Heath. This book
furnishes the arguments with new research, pertinent observations and
irreverent but nonetheless valuable detail. As Ziegler states, Heath was a man of
integrity and was ‘clear headed and resolute’ who presided over one of the most
unified cabinets in the post war era despite the circumstances and who
orchestrated many difficult and courageous decisions for the country that many
admired. However, even this self-proclaimed
‘sympathetic’ biographer cannot help wondering at Heath’s personality flaws:
the pettiness to any perceived slight despite giving many himself; the peddling
to Communist China; the capricious handling of his largesse; the loud silences;
and the arrogance of always thinking he was right.
Heath who lost three out of four elections was unresponsive,
unrepentant and unkind and could not understand why his party and his country
did not want him back in the harness.
Perhaps it was due as Ziegler assesses that ‘[w]hatever they might think
about his policies or his achievements as Prime Minister, the voters had
reservations about him as a human being’.