{"id":1977,"date":"2010-08-01T22:06:39","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T22:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1977"},"modified":"2018-09-16T08:17:12","modified_gmt":"2018-09-16T08:17:12","slug":"stalinist-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/stalinist-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Stalinist justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Guardian<\/em> recently carried a brief obituary of Marian Fagan<\/a>, widow of Otto Sling (1912-1952), one of the accused in the show trials\u00a0that took place in the CzechoSlovak Republic (CSR) in 1950-1952 while under Communist rule.\u00a0 \u00a0 The obituary is written by their son, Karel Schling.\u00a0\u00a0 Sling had been a communist party official, and was one of the 11 (of the 14) defendants executed.\u00a0 Fagan and her sons also spent time in prison as part of the investigations.\u00a0 The show trials were arranged at Stalin’s behest and took place throughout Eastern Europe, with the partial exception of Poland.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The lead defendant in the Czech trials was Rudolf Sl\u00e1nsky, a Deputy Prime Minister who until shortly before his arrest had been Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC).<\/p>\n

Apparently, the CSR President Clement Gottwald had initially resisted Soviet pressure to arrest Sl\u00e1nsky, especially because the two men were personally very close from their time in exile in Moscow.\u00a0\u00a0 Only when threatened with arrest and deposition himself did Gottwald agree to order Sl\u00e1nsky\u2019s arrest, while still delaying the execution of the arrest warrent.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sadly, an attempt by Czech emigre anti-communist intelligence organization Okapi to smear leading communist party officials by falsely associating them\u00a0with western intelligence agencies resulted in an unsolicited letter being sent to Sl\u00e1nsky offering to help him to flee westwards (Lukes 1999), and this letter was then used as evidence for the Soviet allegations of treason against Slansky, forcing Gottwald’s hand.\u00a0\u00a0This false letter appears to have been sent without prior knowledge or consent of western intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n

The dialogue of the show trial was scripted beforehand by Soviet advisors to the Czech intelligence agency, the StB.\u00a0 At least some of the accused had been promised lenient sentences if they followed the scripts provided to them, but these promises were broken.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To ensure that none of the accused spoke off-script (as had happened, for instance, in similar trials in Hungary), the trials were even rehearsed.\u00a0 \u00a0However, due either to independence of spirit or to memory lapses (the accused had been held in solitary confinement and tortured in other ways), not all the accused always followed their scripts: at times, defendants answered questions that had yet to be asked, for example. Because the trials were being broadcast live to the nation, the judges of the court – unable or unwilling to improvise responses – adjourned the trial proceedings immediately these off-script statements occurred.<\/p>\n

Among those falsely arrested and convicted were some who were not even communists or ones not of long standing, including the economist Rudolf Margolius, Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade at the time of his arrest.\u00a0 Margolius only met his alleged fellow-conspirator, Rudolf Sl\u00e1nsky, at the trial itself. \u00a0\u00a0 Despite a promise of a lenient sentence in exchange for following the trial script, Margolius was executed, along with\u00a010 of his 13 co-accused.\u00a0 Three were sentenced to life imprisonment.<\/p>\n

The injustice of this trial and the sentences imposed are not lessened by the observation that Rudolf Sl\u00e1nsky may also have ordered the trial if his and Gottwald’s positions had been reversed, or that others, such as Sling, had been brutal Stalinists when in power themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 An innocent\u00a0victim is still innocent even if he may, in some alternative universe, not be a victim.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 According to Lukes (1999), Czech StB agents were appalled by the torture used by their counterparts in Hungary and Poland.\u00a0\u00a0 However, what strikes me as very interesting is that the Polish communist party leadership managed to mostly resist Stalin’s pressure to hold show trials and executions in this period, a subject deserving of another post.<\/p>\n

Last month also saw the death of Sir Charles Mackerras, US-born, Australian-educated, British conductor and leading champion of Czech music.<\/p>\n

UPDATE (2011-09-11):\u00a0<\/strong> An explanation for Polish recalcitrance is provided by Stewart Steven, who\u00a0argued that the post-war Eastern European show trials were the result of a sophisticated and cunning US intelligence operation, called Splinter Factor and using a Polish double-agent, to create suspicions between pro-Moscow and nationalist communists across the region. As with any writings on intelligence, the truth is hard to determine:\u00a0 there may or may not have been such a US intelligence operation with this goal prior to the trials; if it had existed, it may or may not have been important or catalytic in the creation of the trials; indeed, the publication of a claim of the existence of such an operation 20 years after the trials themselves may itself have been part of some later intelligence operation, and unconnected with the\u00a0earlier events.<\/p>\n

References:<\/em><\/p>\n

An interesting obituary of Marian Sling in The Independent is here<\/a>.\u00a0 If nothing else, it shows that the petty vindictiveness of the stalinists who ran the CSR in the 1950s was not shared by ordinary citizens.<\/p>\n

My prior salute to Czech reform communist Zdenek Mlynar is here<\/a>.\u00a0 Other posts in this series of heroes are here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Igor Lukes [1999]:\u00a0 The Rudolf Sl\u00e1nsky affair:\u00a0 new evidence. Slavic Review<\/em>, 58 (1): 160-187.<\/p>\n

Heda Margolius Kovaly [1997]: Under a Cruel Star:\u00a0 A\u00a0Life in Prague 1941-1968<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 New York, USA:\u00a0 Holmes and Meier.<\/p>\n

Ivan Margolius [2006]:\u00a0 Reflections\u00a0of Prague:\u00a0 Journeys\u00a0Through the 20th Century<\/em>. Chichester, England:\u00a0 Wiley.\u00a0 The Margolius family\u00a0website is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Stewart Steven [1974]:\u00a0 Operation Splinter Factor.\u00a0<\/em> Panther (Granada, edition published 1976).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Guardian recently carried a brief obituary of Marian Fagan, widow of Otto Sling (1912-1952), one of the accused in the show trials\u00a0that took place in the CzechoSlovak Republic (CSR) in 1950-1952 while under Communist rule.\u00a0 \u00a0 The obituary is written by their son, Karel Schling.\u00a0\u00a0 Sling had been a communist party official, and was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,12,34,35,38,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-communism","category-heroes","category-history","category-intelligence-and-espionage","category-politics","p1","y2010","m08","d01","h22"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1977"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9604,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1977\/revisions\/9604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}