Down below, in the penumbrae of state power: young people like Václav Havel imaginatively rescuing a philosophical heritage. Up above, at the grisly summits of totalitarianism: men in grey suits plotting to murder each other. The absolute contrast was not immediately evident, not even to those caught up in the business of murder. On 31 July 1951, in the form of a telegram, President Klement Gottwald sang a hymn of high praise to the General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Rudolf Slánský, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday. ‘Honoured comrade!’ began Gottwald’s greeting. ‘You were always an effective fighter for the promulgation of the Bolshevik line against all opportunist saboteurs and traitors and for the forging of a Bolshevik party.’ And so he steadfastly remained, Gottwald continued. ‘Our whole party, our working people, salute you as their faithful son and warrior filled with love for the working classes and with loyalty to the Soviet Union and to the great Stalin.’73
On exactly the same day that Gottwald sent his telegram, in the basement cellars of Ruzyně prison in Prague, Soviet teachers (as advisers from the motherland were called by their Czechoslovak colleagues) were hard at work torturing their victims into spluttering concocted evidence and spewing false confessions that would soon be used to bring Slánský’s life to a gruesome ending. Such were the paradoxes of socialism that its faithful son and warrior certainly knew and approved of the Soviet and Czechoslovak torturers, who had been busy for at least two years nurturing a climate of terror in the ruling circles of Czechoslovakia. The dirty business of Communists liquidating Communists by means of Communism had begun in the Soviet Union itself, where, against the backdrop of the onset of the Cold War, Stalin’s creeping paranoia, and the Soviet-Yugoslav split, show trials were already an integral feature of Stalinism by the time of Slánský’s fiftieth birthday. The Soviet Union, conforming to the rule that big powers always strive to become even bigger powers,74 now controlled all of Europe east of a line drawn from Stettin on the Baltic Sea to Trieste on the Adriatic. Led by the United States, the Western powers, fearing further expansion of Communism westwards, pursued a geopolitics of ‘containment’.
The Cold War intensified. American strategic support for the Royalists in the Greek Civil War in 1946 was widened the following year into the Truman Doctrine, which offered economic, political, and military assistance to any state threatened by Communism, and the announcement of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe so that it could resist Communism from within. Then during the month of June 1948 two significant Western moves were made to counter Stalinism. The Western powers decided to build up a strong, anti-Soviet West Germany, thus preparing the way for the transformation of the Brussels Union into NATO, so completing the job of ring-fencing the Soviet Union with a global network of strategic military bases. In the same month, President Truman announced that the brief of the newly established Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would be broadened to include covert operations against the Soviet Union and its satellites in the fields of ‘propaganda and economic warfare; preventive direct action including sabotage; subversion including assistance of underground resistance groups; and support for indigenous anti-Communist elements’.75
Stalin ensured that all national roads to socialism were blocked. The western satellites of his empire were now subject unconditionally to the exclusive validity of the Soviet example. The onset of Cold War was interpreted in terms of the ‘growing intensity of class struggle’ in the transition from capitalism to socialism. According to this interpretation, vigilance against class enemies became of paramount importance, since it was to be expected that the enemy, beaten and cornered, would resort to desperate and devious measures to conspire against socialism and its people’s democracies. Class enemies and agents of imperialism would certainly try to infiltrate the Party, which is why, in the spring of 1948, the paranoid suspicions of Stalin found a convenient validation in the Stalinist Tito’s rebellion against Stalin’s own attempts to turn Yugoslavia into a subservient client state. The purges would undoubtedly have taken place without Tito’s antics, but the fact that they occurred confirmed the principle that the most dangerous class enemy was the one who held a Party card and occupied a high-ranking position in the apparatus.
The purges that followed in the Soviet Union were not a replay of the Great Terror of the 1930s.76 In those power struggles, the victims were first selected and the necessary script written afterwards. This time round, the script was first written and then the victims were selected. The point was to produce a ‘theatrical masterpiece’77, broadcast live from the courtroom and given the widest possible publicity. The identity of the player-victims was also different. Arthur Koestler’s tragic hero and victim, Rubashov, talked and acted like Bukharin and wore Trotsky’s pince-nez and represented the entire Bolshevik old guard, Lenin’s comrades-in-arms brutally destroyed by Stalin’s thirst for absolute power.78 Now, fifteen years later, it was the turn of the young guard of the Communist leadership to be annihilated. These were men and women who were most definitely not opponents of Stalin. No less devoted to the policies of Moscow than their executioners, they simply had the misfortune of having been chosen by their master to serve him as victims, according to the rule: genuine Communists were required to distrust pseudo-Communists.
The ageing paranoiac Stalin applied this rule by accusing Molotov, Zhukov, Beria, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and even his personal secretary Poskrebyshev of being English spies. Some of their relatives were arrested; even their wives and children were thrown into prison as traitors. Chief Party ideologist Andrei Zhdanov was forced into early retirement and died suddenly under mysterious circumstances. Stalin, who was probably responsible for his death, reacted by accusing the top Jewish physicians in the Kremlin of his murder by a ‘doctors’ plot’. Many thousands of prominent Soviet Jews were liquidated. Plans were drawn up to deport all remaining Jews to Birobidjan in Central Asia. In the so-called ‘Leningrad affair’, which was closely related to Zhdanov’s death, virtually the entire staff of Leningrad’s Party apparatus, the local Komsomol and Soviet executive committee, as well as teachers, professors, factory managers and scientific personnel, were arrested. Many thousands were executed. Even Stalin’s chief weapon of terror, the security service headed by Lavrentii Beria, was torn apart by accusations of spying, arrests, and plans to liquidate Beria himself.
From the Soviet Union, the terror spread, first to Albania, with the secret proceedings against the fallen Albanian Minister of the Interior, Koci Xoxe; into Bulgaria, in the form of the Kostov trial; and then to Hungary, where the trial of Lászlo Rajk served as the prelude of the terror in Czechoslovakia. The spreading pattern of terror in Havel’s own country was virtually formulaic. The executioners wasted no time with the victims. They certainly had their methods of humiliating class enemies in civilized ways. Diets were improved, espresso was offered in proper cups, calcium shots were administered, and waiters brought sandwiches and wine into prison cells. Concerned doctors healed tortured bodies. Kind interrogators handed out cigarettes, promised light sentences and helped their prey to rehearse their memorized confessions, which sometimes changed in accordance with the latest Party lines. The pampered victims suffered terribly. In a matter of weeks or sometimes only days, Communists who were physically and psychologically tortured were robbed of their clear-headed humanity, transformed into helpless clumps of inhuman flesh. Comrades beat comrades with rifle butts and rubber truncheons. The victims’ nails were ripped out. They were then denied food and drinking water and forced to drink the piss and eat the shit of their captors. They were dragged unconscious into cages in which they could only crouch; submerged in electrified water baths; threatened with the arrest and disposal of their children and spouses. The world-historical point was to humiliate them, to teach them the meaning of class struggle. The methods were mostly failsafe... except when overzealous comrades, acting out the laws of history, tortured their comrades into insanity, or plunged them into the deep night of death.
During the long period of terror that raged for five and a half years in all, rotating the whole time on the narrow axis of the Slánský trial, the prisons of Pankrác, Koloděje, Leopoldov, and Ruzyně were stuffed full of class enemies. More than a hundred people were murdered. Tens of thousands were jailed or deported, and — the figures apply to a country with a population of only 14 million — more than 136,000 souls, Communists, fellow travellers and non-Communists alike, were victims of the terror in one way or another. Although, as Havel’s private schooling at this moment illustrated, the terror did not penetrate every nook and cranny of Czechoslovak life, its scope was considerable. Since its epicentre was the Party — according to one interpretation — the large footprint of the terror should not be surprising.79Prior to the outbreak of World War II, this view supposes, the highly industrialized parliamentary republic of Czechoslovakia had (after Germany and France) the third largest Communist Party in non-Soviet Europe. Its supporters had been prominent as volunteers in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Most of its cadres and leaders had fled from the Nazis to France and then England, where they worked with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. From the point of view of the post-’48 terrorists, therefore, Czechoslovakia contained the largest nest, on the western margins of the Soviet empire, of Spaniards, Westerners, Trotskyists, Titoists, Jews, and other unreliable — and exterminable — elements.
Large numbers of potentially ‘objective’ enemies of socialism cannot alone explain the frenzied terror during Havel’s teenage years. Nor can the terror be understood by means of explanations that refer symptomatically to ‘personality cults’ or the frenzied paranoia about ‘bourgeois nationalism’ or ‘imperialism’ or ‘Trotskyism’ or ‘Titoism’ or ‘Zionism’. The depurators’ detailing of ‘class enemies’ and their crimes in this way was obviously a key feature of the terror. But to say that it was caused by paranoiac labelling is merely to redescribe the metaphors mobilized by men and women who were dragged from their beds at night into a laboratory of power organized by the rule that politics could do anything. The belief in the necessity of conducting politics as a vicious, life-or-death struggle between friends and enemies no doubt stemmed partly from the deracination and consequent dehumanization of significant parts of the Czech and Slovak political classes by nearly two decades of international betrayal, Nazification, total war, zoologism, and a Communist coup d’état. During the Terror phase of the French Revolution, it was noted by Germaine de Staël that the prior breakdown of social bonds fed the irritability and mutual jealousy of actors who were consequently inclined to humiliate one another.80 During the Czechoslovak terror this same pattern of incivility was at work. But it was fed as well by the key actors’ belief in the possibility of human regeneration through power politics.
Actors like Gottwald and Slánský thought of themselves as waging a struggle for universal human emancipation. The point was to change the world through revolution. This meant that it was imperative to recognize the gap between the facts of life as it was currently and the wished-for goal of a classless society without state power. That gap between facts and vision could not be denied or overlooked without abandoning the principles of the revolution itself. So the revolution dictated only one alternative: if Communist society was not yet a fact, then this was because there were enemies who stood in the way. Fashioning the human condition in unprecedented ways thus required everybody to realize that the revolution was endangered, that its enemies had precipitated an emergency situation which could only be resolved by cunning political action aimed at liquidating such enemies. The stage of revolution was thick with wilful actors divided between those with pure intentions and others with evil plans. No power was innocent, no will beyond suspicion. The only certain thing was that the impure should be purged from the body politic — by actors arrogating to themselves what had once been a divine monopoly, that of creating the human world by redesigning it. Insofar as perverse wills still stood like logs on the road to socialism, politics had to eliminate all opposition. This was the ultimate purpose of the terror: to frighten and then do away for ever with the adversaries of history. The show trial was its necessary propaganda arm: its immediate purpose was to personalize class enemies, to put them in the dock in flesh and blood, to put a face on abstract, ‘objective’ political crimes, to give the world one last look at the scoundrel enemies of history before their physical liquidation and political murder.