Language:
English
Year of publication:
2023
Titel der Quelle:
Journal of Modern History
Angaben zur Quelle:
95,4 (2023) 847-886
Keywords:
Slánský, Rudolf Trials, litigation, etc.
;
Antisemitism History 1945-
;
Jewish communists
;
Trials (Political crimes and offenses)
;
Jews History 1945-
Abstract:
In November 1952, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other prominent Communist Party leaders underwent a widely publicized political trial. Slánský featured as the alleged ringleader of a conspiracy of “Trotskyist-Titoist Zionists, bourgeois-nationalist traitors” working on behalf of “American imperialists.” Following the trial, eleven of the fourteen defendants, among them Slánský, were hanged and the ashes of their bodies strewn along a road leading out of Prague. The remaining three received life sentences. Eleven of the original fourteen defendants, the prosecutor declared, were “of Jewish origin.” Up to now, the surprisingly sparse scholarship on the Slánský trial has argued that Slánský’s November 1951 arrest, as well as the antisemitic tone of the trial, were engineered primarily by Soviet advisors and Joseph Stalin himself. This article, which draws upon previously ignored archival materials in the former Soviet Union and a fresh, post–Cold War reading of archival materials in today’s Czech Republic, argues instead that local dynamics within the Czechoslovak Communist Party were paramount. Specifically, it focuses on how and why Czechoslovak Communist members denounced one another to Soviet officials, and how these denunciations laid the groundwork for Slánský’s downfall while breaking the previous taboo within the party on antisemitic rhetoric. It thus reveals much about the nature of the Czechoslovak-Soviet relationship, as well as relationships between other countries of Communist Eastern Europe and Moscow, before Stalin’s death in 1953—relationships that were not as one-sided as many scholars and others beyond academia often assume.
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