A better Socialism! Different from Stalin’s! The pipsqueak! Socialism without Stalin was no different from fascism!
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
AN EPIC FALLING-OUT between two giants of the Communist firmament, Stalin and Tito, ultimately sealed Noel Field’s fate. The Soviet-occupied lands of the East were run from Moscow and nominally headed by little Stalins—puppets whose every move Moscow monitored and controlled. All but one. Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito was his own man. A hero of the anti-Nazi resistance, Tito had built both the Yugoslav army and its secret police. He did not need Soviet troops to keep himself in power; he was that unique Communist leader whose own people largely supported him. A handsome, charismatic, ruthless dictator, he was loyal to Stalin but put Yugoslavia’s interests a shade ahead of Moscow’s. By 1948, Stalin demanded absolute fealty and could not abide Tito’s independence, nor his talk of a Balkan federation of Communist states.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brilliantly captured Stalin’s agony as he pondered the young Yugoslav “upstart” in an imaginary internal monologue. “On the ottoman lay a man,” Solzhenitsyn described Stalin in In the First Circle,
whose likeness has been more often sculpted, painted in oils, watercolors, gouache, and sepia; limned in charcoal, chalk, and powdered brick; pieced together in a mosaic of road maker’s gravel . . . etched on ivory; grown in grass; woven into carpets; spelled out by planes flying in formation . . . than any other face ever has been in the three billion years since the earth’s crust was formed. . . .
He had run rings around them on the Danube and in the Balkans. . . . All Soviet prisoners returning home after living in Europe were sent to the camps. All prisoners who had served only one ten year sentence were sent back to serve another.
In a word, things seemed to be coming right at last. But when the Siberian taiga no longer rustled with hints of alternative socialism, the black dragon Tito crept into the open and blocked all roads ahead. . . . How could he have let himself be misled? Failed to discern the scorpion soul of the man! In 1936 they had Tito by the throat! And they let him get away! Ay . . . ay . . . ay . . . ay . . . ay!
A better Socialism! Different from Stalin’s! The pipsqueak! Socialism without Stalin was no different from fascism!
Stalin groaned, swung his legs off the couch and clutched his balding head. Vain regrets rankled in his bosom. He had toppled mountains and he had tripped over a dunghill. . . . Not that Tito would get anywhere. Nothing would come of his efforts. As an old horse doctor who has slit open any number of bellies, chopped off innumerable extremities in smoky peasant huts, looks at a lady medic in the making, come to do her practical work in spotless white, that was how Stalin looked at Tito. . . .
But Tito made play with long forgotten slogans from the early days of the Revolution: “workers control,” “land for the peasants” . . . soap bubbles to fascinate idiots . . .
He took a deep breath. Stroked his face and his mustache. Took another deep breath. He must not let it all get him down.
Ah yes, he had to see Abakumov. . . .
Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov—as head of the Soviet Ministry of State Security, the second most feared man in the Soviet empire—was instructed to put in motion the liquidation of the bothersome Yugoslav. In June 1948, the members of the Communist International “voted” to expel Yugoslavia from their ranks. Henceforth, the “hero of the Yugoslav resistance” was “the chained dog of the imperialists.” The news that Stalin had expelled Tito and Yugoslavia from the Comintern—the first fracture in the postwar, Kremlin-controlled, Communist border states—broke like a thunderclap over Europe and the United States.
Tito, though distressed by his excommunication, was safe in his Belgrade stronghold, and unbending. Confident of Yugoslav support, he would weather the Kremlin’s ban.
Stalin upped the ante. He had to make an object lesson out of this renegade Communist. He would demonstrate the high cost of veering one inch from the Kremlin’s leadership, and instill terror in both the occupied populations and their leaders. Those Communist leaders who were within his reach—however faithful they might be to Stalin—would be liquidated. They would be tried in people’s courts and revealed to be “Titoists”—the highest crime since the sin of being Trotskyite in the thirties. To be a Titoist meant working for the Americans.
Now, all who had spent time in the West, who had not spent the war years in Moscow under Stalin’s watchful gaze, who had been part of the International Brigades, all those who did not owe the little father their positions in their own countries, found themselves in Stalin’s crosshairs.
All that was missing from the scenario hatched by Stalin, Abakumov, and Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, was a key witness, someone who could tie Tito and all the other now undesirable and dangerous international Communists to the New Enemy: the United States. That detail would nail all of them as spies and traitors. All of Eastern Europe could then finally be cleansed of “foreign” elements. Stalin’s dream of absolute power would be fulfilled, his rage at Tito calmed.
There was one man who could fill that role. Noel Field could connect Eastern Bloc leaders—Tito among them—to the camp of the imperialists. Through his “Red Aid,” compliments of the Unitarian Service Committee, Field had provided exiled Communists funds and logistical support in getting back to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. Best of all: Noel could link them to Allen W. Dulles. It mattered not that the American was a true-believing Stalinist, a traitor to his own country, desperate to come East and serve. Field had recently been outed as a Communist in his own country, thus, Washington might not make a big fuss if anything were to happen to him. Therein, too, lay opportunity.
Show trials, like today’s terrorist videos of beheadings, were meant to spread terror and fear. Unrelated to justice for the accused, debased and brutalized before their executions—these “trials” were intended as graphic lessons to the living. A similar script had enjoyed a huge success in a prior run in Moscow between 1936 and 1938, when Stalin liquidated his “enemies” in sham trials. A stunned world had witnessed the heroes of the Bolshevik revolution confess to treason and beg for the gallows as their just punishment. Instead of Trotskyites, the 1949 suspects would be Titoists, but the methods for extracting confessions, and the judicial travesty that followed, would be a precise replay. Again, as in the thirties, hard-core Communists would be in the dock, performing their final “service” for the party—after torture, of course. Only the cast, led by an American, was new.
Stalin chose Budapest as the venue for the world premiere. In Hungary’s little Stalin, Mátyás Rákosi, the Kremlin had its most eager and subservient partner. By offering his unflinching support, Rákosi was assuring his own political future. Moreover, under the guise of liquidating Hungarian Titoists, the much-loathed Rákosi could eliminate his own most dangerous rival in the Hungarian Communist Party: László Rajk, a genuine Communist war hero. Unlike Rákosi, who spent the war in Moscow, Rajk, after bravely fighting in the Spanish Civil War, joined the French Resistance before returning to fight fascists in Hungary. Tall, handsome, and charismatic, Rajk loomed too large next to the short, bald, neckless Rákosi.
Happily for Stalin and Rákosi, there was a tiny shard of “evidence” against Rajk that could be magnified into “treason.” As foreign minister, Rajk had warmly greeted Tito on the Yugoslav’s state visit to Hungary, before he became public enemy number one of the people’s democracies. Minor technicalities—the fact that Rajk had never actually met his alleged “coconspirators” Noel Field or Allen Dulles—the scriptwriters could easily fix.
In a matter of months, the judicial screenplay “unmasking” the Dulles-Field-Rajk conspiracy to overthrow Rákosi and Stalin and restore fascism to Hungary was ready.
How to get Field into Rákosi’s custody was the stage managers’ next challenge. Given Field’s desperation for sanctuary in the East, this proved to be remarkably light work.
Oblivious to the conspiracies swirling around him, Field was an easy mark. Having failed to get hearings in East Berlin and Warsaw, his last hope was Prague. With growing agitation, Noel wrote the Czech minister of information, Oskar Kosta. “I need hardly tell you how much we are looking forward to coming back to Prague again,” he wrote. “In one form or another, we shall put our shoulders to the wheel of progress and once more absorb something of the new spirit and life which we so sorely miss here.”
This was astonishing zeal to enter a country slowly morphing into a prison state. In 1948, Prague was wrapped in sullen gloom. Stalin forced Czechoslovakia to refuse the Marshall Plan economic assistance—a political and economic catastrophe for its war-ravaged economy. Czechoslovakia’s once thriving free-enterprise economy was forced to duplicate the one-size-fits-all Soviet model. Czechs with the means were packing up and fleeing west. Stalin had recently summoned their popular foreign minister, Jan Masaryk. “I went to Moscow as foreign minister of an independent sovereign state,” Masaryk said. “I returned as a lackey of the Soviet government.” On March 1, 1948, Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of Prague’s Czernin Palace: another plunge from another window dressed up as suicide.
General Fyodor Bielkin, the regional Soviet proconsul, now ordered Czech president Klement Gottwald to immediately issue Field a visa. Mobilize the Czech security services, the Russian instructed the Czech president. Prepare to kidnap the American.
In early March 1949, Noel received a letter from a Czech Ministry of the Interior official, inviting him to Prague to discuss a teaching position at his earliest convenience. For the frantic Noel this was the long-awaited break: a job, a country, a chance for a new life safely out of the reach of the House Un-American Activities Committee. “Noel told us he was going to Prague,” his assistant Hélène Matthey said, “to study at Charles University. I asked, ‘Study what?’ ‘Just study,’ he said.”
On May 9, Noel wrote Herta from Prague, “Today I’m sticking close to my room, waiting for a call from the Foreign Ministry. . . . It’s lunch time, and still no call for me yet, so shall go over to the Press Club [underlined by the secret police] to mail this letter . . . and then come back to my room, Thine, Noel.”