Stalin's Show Trials | Of Loyalty and Betrayal, Euphoria and Horror

A book – a risk. And it's a success. Although I'd warn you against using a perfidious Western intelligence operation to atone for your own sins.

Hartmut König has written a novel. Even though the songwriter calls his book a docufiction, he draws on real historical events that have left wounds and scars – in the movement that began in 1917 with noble promises, filling millions around the globe with hope, liberating them from oppression, plunder, robbery, disenfranchisement, and enslavement. Encouraged by a model that ultimately disappointed: socialism as actually practiced on one-sixth of the earth.

No, Hartmut König doesn't want to compete with Franz Kafka ("The Trial") or George Orwell ("1984"). He's not "just" concerned with accusations; he's looking for explanations. He delves deeper and, as a younger contemporary, knows more than the German-Czech writer, who died young in 1924, anticipated, or than the Briton in Spain had to experience in the ranks of the international fighters against Franco's fascist putschists. Hartmut König, born in 1947, knows about the monstrous show trials in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as well as in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s, about the structures, mechanisms, and people. Not from his own experience, but through the stories of those affected, victims and perpetrators alike, who broke their silence after decades, as well as thanks to academic research in archives opened in the early 1990s.

In his political thriller, the trained journalist (who, incidentally, had completed an internship at "Neues Deutschland"), co-founder of the legendary October Club, a once popular FDJ singing group, and deputy minister of culture in the last year of the GDR, focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on the anti-Semitic tribunal against Rudolf Slánský and his comrades in Prague in 1952, but also on the other show trials against top communist officials in the immediate postwar period. Such as the one three years earlier in Budapest against László Rajk, also a former Spanish fighter, and the one in Sofia against Trajtscho Kostow, a former commander of a partisan unit. The trial planned in Warsaw against Władysław Gomułka fortunately did not take place, but the Polish communist, who had fought against the Nazi occupation, was also arrested and expelled from the party. In Tirana, the founder of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, Enver Hoxha, rigorously eliminated perceived rivals. Everything followed the same pattern and bore the primary signature of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria. Hartmut König, however, also sees other forces pulling the strings. But from the very beginning.

In the 1970s, the author was editor-in-chief of "World Students News," published in Prague by the International Student Union. "Even if you lived behind the Iron Curtain, you weren't stupid, blind, or totally ignorant." On a January day in 1974, when "Rudé právo," the central organ of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, had announced the death of disgraced Communist Party official Josef Smrkovský, the young German was about to enjoy a "Staropramen" in a bar in Prague's Lesser Quarter when an older gentleman engaged him in conversation:

Josef didn't deserve that. "To be thrown into such an undignified grave. As if he hadn't been the leader of the communist underground groups. A hero during the Nazi occupation and a great hope afterward. But betrayed by Stalin and his Prague followers. Arrested, wrongfully convicted. Released after Stalin's death without a return to public honor. First rose to prominence under Dubček and fell again with him." Thus spoke the old Czech to the student functionary from the neighboring GDR, drawing his attention to the building across the street where Slánský and his comrades had been sentenced to death or several years in prison on absurd charges. The tragedy of the Reds on the Vltava was eating away at his heart, the old man added.

Half a century later, Hartmut König recalls the episode and seeks to shed light on the fate of Josef Smrkovský and his fellow sufferers. He delves into the historical material and encounters not only mistrust and denunciation within the international communist movement, but also a targeted disinformation campaign by Western intelligence agencies – the secret operation "Splinter Factor," launched by the CIA in 1948. "The operation led to a spiral of paranoia and repression, culminating in large-scale show trials in the socialist camp." This is the material from which Hartmut König weaves his story, from "historical facts and literary imagination."

The tragic fate of Oskar Chesilsksi, a fictional character whose life story could be considered representative of communist functionaries in Eastern and Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century, is to be clarified. The docufiction begins with a long letter that his grandson receives one day in November 1990 from the Philippines, with which someone apparently wants to ease his heart in his twilight years. The 90-year-old sender, named Pavel Novák, reveals himself to be a comrade of Oskar Chesilsksi in British exile when Nazi Germany had Europe in its stranglehold. He was working for the US Office for Strategic Services (OSS), fighting Hitler fascism within the united Allied coalition. After the liberation, Chesilsksi immediately returned to Czechoslovakia and assumed high positions in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but was then arrested, sentenced to death, and executed. The letter writer reveals to his grandson: "His fate, however, has given me no peace since then. It had always been clear to me that the public accusations against Oskar lacked any factual basis. Then, connections to a fellow soldier in the OSS gave me a lead to those responsible for his death. Your grandfather fell victim to a perfidious postwar conspiracy." Some accomplices are still alive.

The grandson, who grew up in the sheltered GDR and is a fan of Che Guevara (which is why he likes to call himself Che) as well as Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, is electrified. Intrigued, he flies to Manila, wanting to know what happened, who defamed his grandfather, and why.

In the episode, those involved in the Oskar Chesilsksi case take turns speaking, reporting more or less honestly about their part in his sad fate. The prosecutor in charge is haunted by the nightmares: "The constant flashes of indelible guilt. The arrests. The nights of torture. The extorted confessions. The shameful verdicts. The hasty executions." Karel Soubek confesses that he has become a murderer. And justifies himself: "But what was I supposed to do back then? I was in the wrong position during those bad years. A panicky fear of traitors was rampant throughout the party. The people's democracies were defending the part of the world they had won. The opposing powers were counting on erosion at its core. For this, they needed their quislings and bribed comrades... Enemies with party membership had to be excised from society like cancerous tumors from human bodies. And those at the top first."

Soviet intelligence officer and military man Vorotnikov was cut from the same cloth: "At that time, there was no doubt. Everything was done in the service of the cause. Even the exposure of the Zionist agent Chesilski. His liquidation was a warning to all cosmopolitans who had infiltrated our ranks." His American counterpart, Robert Snyder, who participated in D-Day, the landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and later worked as a double agent for the CIA and KGB, is more thoughtful, but played a no less fatal role in the affair. More serious, however, is the testimony of Mark Ashley, who claimed to have recruited Oskar Chesilski as an informant for the CIA in 1949. A blatant lie: "He was prepared to take this step due to irreconcilable political differences with the leadership of the Communist Party of Germany and Klement Gottwald personally."

On the other side is Ari Blum, who had flown out of Prague with Oskar Chesilski ahead of the Wehrmacht and was sent to Eastern Europe by David Ben-Gurion after the war: "We were looking for allies. The British had set us up... The Soviet Union had quickly recognized us and ordered the Czechs to supply us with weapons. We couldn't expect anything from the English and Americans." The arms deal was arranged as quietly as possible, with his former comrade Chesilski as the Czech negotiator. But then the tide changed, Ari Blum recounts. "Suddenly, Stalin, at the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, took a stand against the Jews." Anyone who had contact with a certain Noel H. Field, head of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) during the war, a US aid organization that helped Jews escape German anti-Semites, was now considered a henchman of imperialist world Jewry. Ari Blum is arrested and is supposed to testify against Chesilski: "All of these were silly words, as fabricated and false as they were extremely dangerous. When I claimed during interrogations that I had always negotiated with Soviet approval, I was shouted down..." He is ashamed of having given up his resistance: "But even the defendants made confessions whose absurdity was as clear to me as it was to the interrogators. First the bones, then the honor – that was usually the order." Ultimately, Ari Blum, too, is shot, in Tel Aviv.

It's unbelievable how many people are entangled in the conspiracy. And how many died senselessly or were broken forever. Of course, there's also a love story. "The night with little Chesilski was beautiful," says Irkat, whose father was also a victim of Stalin's paranoia and who is nevertheless a devout communist. Her monologue addresses, among other things, the so-called "Doctors' Plot," Stalin's last great crime. And Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956. But above all, she describes in detail Operation "Splinter Factor," one of the CIA's most perfidious espionage coups: "It's a disgrace how Allen Dulles engineered the deadly frame-up for the agency. How he turned the harmless left-wing philanthropist Noel Field into a shrewd agent recruiter who allegedly drove communists returning from exile in the West into American spy services. And how they had a defector from the Polish secret service named Józef Światło whisper this lie into Stalin's ear, which meant death and imprisonment for so many communists associated with Field."

The ending of the political thriller is surprising. The story is truly fit for the stage, with a Shakespearean twist. "Where there is love and loyalty, there is also betrayal; where devotion there is also disappointment; where euphoria there is also horror; where illusion there is also disillusionment."

Hartmut König: Stalin, Dulles, and the Gallows in Prague. Documentary fiction. Das Neue Berlin, 128 pp., paperback, €14.