On 20 November 1952 — at the moment when the strongly mothered sixteen-year-old Havel was beginning to fancy himself an intellectual — there began the week-long ‘Trial of the Leadership of the Anti-State Conspiratorial Centre led by Rudolf Slánský’. Comrade Slánský and his thirteen co-defendants were led handcuffed into the courtroom of Prague’s Pankrác prison and seated before the chief prosecutor, Josef Urválek, the hand-picked members of the court, and the counsels for the defence. Pre-printed copies of the trial script, complete with questions and answers, were on hand. Everything was pre-planned. Nobody was allowed to forget their lines, which was unlikely since Security Minister Karol Bacílek had arranged beforehand the taped filming of a dress rehearsal of the trial, with the interrogators acting the role of the judges, just to ensure that on the day no defendant retracted his confession. And so that everybody of note could relax in the certainty of the trial’s outcome, the tape of the dress rehearsal had been screened privately a few days beforehand to an audience consisting of Gottwald and chosen members of the inner Party leadership.101
This was no ordinary kangaroo court, but instead a bizarre exercise of totalitarian power. The particulars of the alleged crimes were incidental to the proceedings. The individual defendants themselves were of no significance as individuals. It is true that here stood men with rich biographies. For a moment or two longer they would remain high-ranking Communists. Once, some had risked their lives on the battlefields of Spain. Others had served in the French Resistance. There were those who had fought with the partisans in the forests and mountains of Slovakia. Still others had endured the hell of Nazi prisons and concentration camps. None of this mattered, for now their time had come to be reduced to nothingness — to be transformed into inert molecules in a crazed experiment in the arts of legalized terror.
According to the surviving trial transcripts and press reports, Slánský and his comrades were police informers, imperialist spies, Trotskyite traitors, ultimately agents of a bourgeois-nationalist-Titoist plot to murder Klement Gottwald and overthrow the government of Czechoslovakia. Slánský was accused of conspiring with the arch-criminal Konni Zilliacus, a left-wing British Labour Member of Parliament, ‘with the aim of detaching Czechoslovakia from the Soviet Union and from the camp of the people’s democracies’. Slánský was implicated as well in what the indictment called the work of the ‘Fascist-Tito clique’. He in fact confessed in his deposition to a meeting with Moša Pijade, who gave him Tito’s order to step up the counter-revolutionary struggle in Czechoslovakia. Slánský admitted that ‘the anti-state conspiracy centre followed a line similar to that of Tito’. Then came the anti-Semitic abuse. The Jewish ancestry and habits of Slánský and the other defendants were repeatedly emphasized. One of the witnesses reported that Slánský had developed contacts with the spies of ‘international Zionism’. Another described him as ‘the son of a wealthy Jewish family, the great hope of all of the Jews within the Communist Party’. Yet another prattled on about Slánský as an agent of Zionism, and Zionism as an agent of American imperialism in its fight against the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies. ‘Under the pretext of helping the Jewish emigration to Israel,’ he added, ‘Slánský assisted the illegal flight of a great number of capitalist elements who fraudulently smuggled out of the country large quantities of gold, silver, and jewellery.’
Trials peppered with words like these were commonplace throughout the courts of the country. The show trials even gathered momentum after news of the death of Stalin reached Prague during the first week of March 1953. Stalin may have expired; his body could no longer breathe or move, but in Czechoslovakia his nails continued to lengthen. Within the Soviet Union, the death of the butcher led almost immediately to the issuing of some closure notices on the whole bloody business of slaughter. The Jewish physicians arrested in connection with the alleged ‘doctors’ plot’ were released from their Moscow prison cells. The first groups of intrepid survivors of the Gulag archipelago were released. Khrushchev ordered the arrest and execution of Beria and other administrators of the apparatus of terror. The stage-managers of the show trials in central-eastern Europe, former State Security Minister Abakumov and General Byelkin, were shot. So too were the two main Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) advisers in the Czechoslovak purges, Generals Likhachev and Makarov.
But in Czechoslovakia the incarceration and killing by show trial gathered pace. Even the death of Gottwald, one week after returning from the funeral of his master in Moscow, failed to bring the terror to a halt. The committee led by Gottwald’s successor, Antonín Zápotocký, who was assisted by such people as Václav Kopecký, the personal enemy of Miloš Havel, actually worked hard to step up the terror. The political reason was clear: since they were the ones whose political careers were deeply entangled in the terror, and certainly responsible for the torture and trial and disposal of their comrades, any reprieve would most probably have resulted in their own arrest, torture, and killing. So tu quoque terror claimed its victims. A number of high-ranking diplomats and officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — Pavel Kavan from the embassy in London; Eduard Goldstücker, former envoy to Israel; Karel Dufek, chargé d’affaires in Turkey — were given long-term sentences and packed off to prison. There were six secret trials of key officials in the Ministry of the Interior. Among them were the head of its security department, Osvald Závodský, a former International Brigade commander in the Spanish Civil War; and the Deputy Minister of the Interior, Josef Pavel, who was sentenced to twenty-five years in a concentration camp. Shortly afterwards, there were another six secret trials of senior army officers. There was also the trial of the ‘Trotskyist Grand Council’, which comprised seven second-rank Communist apparatchiks who were sentenced to a total of 103 years in prison. This was followed by the major show trial of Slovak Communist leaders, including the ‘Slovak bourgeois-nationalist’ Gustáv Husák, who retracted his confession in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The whole project of terror during this period was a considerable technical achievement. Hundreds of high-ranking Communists of Party and state had to be rounded up, interrogated, tortured, imprisoned, executed, disposed of. Thousands of trial witnesses had to be primed, only later to be arrested and brought into the dock in connection with things they had or had not said. There were in addition tens of thousands of lesser Communists who had to be sentenced summarily to long spells in prison or shipped off to concentration camps on elaborately prepared fictitious crimes of sabotage, espionage, Zionism and bourgeois-nationalism. Many of them had to be kept under surveillance in prison for two or three years before their cases were heard. During that time, Party security agents had to organize their signing of revised versions of their confessions, in accordance with the latest changes in government policy.
The terrorists huddled around Antonín Zápotocký had their hands full in supervising the sorting of victims into the proper groups, dictating their statements, preparing their show trials, and administering their punishment. Yet at no point did they ever overlook their important task of finishing off the high-ranking apparatchiks who (for reasons of time and showcasing) had not featured in the earlier trial of Slánský. So they set upon heads of the regional organizations; members of the Central Committee, most of them Jews; and a key defendant, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Marie Švermová, for whom the prosecutor had asked the death penalty, but who was sentenced merely to life imprisonment. She was lucky, if a reprieve from death by terror can be called luck. On 27 November 1952, the hapless Slánský and ten of his co-defendants, tranquillized into indifference with pills and staring fixedly straight ahead, were handed the prearranged verdict of the Pankrác prison court: death. Six days later, on a chilly but.bright 3 December, each was hanged. The bodies were immediately cremated, the ashes shovelled into sacks and scattered on an icy side road in the outskirts of Prague.102