Bob Brookmeyer, RIP
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The Slánský trial: Stalinism, antisemitism and “anti-Zionism”
An the 60th anniversary of these events approaches, Stan Crooke begins an important new piece of analysis:
PART ONE: THE REHEARSALS
2012 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the “Trial of the Anti-State Conspiratorial Centre led by Rudolf Slansky”, staged in the Czechoslovak capital of Prague.
Sixty years ago, The Slansky Trial was one of a series of Eastern European post-war Stalinist show-trials in which leading Communist Party members confessed – after prolonged physical and psychological torture – to being longstanding agents of imperialism.
But the trial also broke new ground. It was the first show-trial in which state-sponsored anti-semitism played a central role. As the “New York Times”, reporting on the trial under the headline “Tragi-Comedy in Prague”, put it:
“If this were only a re-hash of the Zinoviev and Kamenev ordeals of the 1930s (Stalinist show-trials), we might regard it as a purely Soviet farce playing a return in a new adaptation. But there is something new in this latest trial.”
“The charge (is) that Slansky and the majority of his fellow-defendants, who are of Jewish origin, were members of a vast Jewish conspiracy, betraying their country to ‘American imperialism’ in order to serve the state of Israel.”
“Here we have the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but in the Stalinist version. So the Prague trial is not merely a comedy; rather it may well mark the beginning of a major tragedy as the Kremlin swings further and further towards anti-semitism masked as anti-Zionism.”
At the centre of the trial – and the supposed conspiracy – was Rudolf Slansky, a lifelong member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CPC) who had joined the party on its creation in 1921 and been elected to its Central Committee in 1929.
Elected to the Czechoslovak National Assembly in 1935, Slansky fled to the Soviet Union after the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1944, taking part in the “Slovak National Rising”, and was elected CPC General Secretary the following year.
Following the CPC ‘putsch’ of 1948, in which the non-CPC parties were driven out of what had previously been a coalition government, Slansky was nominally the second most powerful person in the country, after President Klement Gottwald.
In reality, however, he was frequently a more decisive political actor and a more powerful political figure than Gottwald.
The official celebrations which marked Slansky’s fiftieth birthday, in July of 1951, appeared to underline his grip on power. He was awarded the Order of Socialism (the highest state decoration). An avalanche of the obligatory laudatory articles appeared in the press. And his collected works (“For the Victory of Socialism”) were published.
A telegram from Gottwald informed Slansky: “Our entire party and all working people greet you as their faithful son and warrior, suffused with love for the working people and fidelity to the Soviet Union and the great Stalin.”
But the script was already being written for Slansky to play the lead role in a Czech version of the show-trials which swept through Eastern Europe in the years following 1948.
In response to the onset of the Cold War and the rift with Tito’s Yugoslavia in June of that year, Stalin had clamped down on the Communist Parties in the Soviet Union’s satellite states.
The subsequent Moscow-inspired (and Moscow-orchestrated) purges and show trials sent out a warning to the leaders of the ‘fraternal’ Communist Parties that any dissent from the Kremlin’s policies was punishable by death.
In June of 1949 the Albanian Interior Minister Koci Xoxe was executed. He had been accused of ‘Titoism’ (and of being an agent of US and British imperialism).
The Hungarian Interior Minister Laszlo Rajk was executed in October of the same year, after having been accused of being ‘a Titoite spy’ (and an agent of western imperialism).
December of 1949 saw the execution of Traycho Kostov, Bulgaria’s President of the Council of Ministers. He had variously been accused of spying on behalf of the British, American and Yugoslav secret services, sabotaging the Bulgarian economy, and undermining relations with the Soviet Union.
It was the Rajk Trial which acted as the trigger for what eventually became the Slansky Trial.
In mid-1949 the Hungarian Communist Party General Secretary, Matyas Rakosi, provided Gottwald with a list of around sixty Czech officials who had been named by Rajk’s ‘co-conspirators’ as supposed collaborators.
Arrests by the Czechoslovak security services of some of those named on the list began to take place from November of 1949 onwards. Initially, the interrogations pointed in the direction of a show-trial of Slovak ‘bourgeois nationalists’.
(Such a show-trial did eventually take place, but not until April of 1954, and with a focus on ‘anti-Zionism’ as much as on ‘Slovak bourgeois nationalism’.)
In late 1950 and early 1951 the arrest and interrogation of another 60 officials were approved by Gottwald and Slansky. Around the same time a new – and much more imaginative – script for an eventual show-trial was drafted
In this version Otto Sling (CPC Brno Regional Secretary) and Marie Svermova (CPC Central Committee Secretary) were the leaders of an underground Trotskyist organisation, recruited from CPC veterans of the Spanish Civil War and CPC members who had spent the war in exile in London.
With the support of Slovak ‘bourgeois nationalists’, they had been preparing a coup aimed at removing Gottwald, Slansky and Zapotocky (the Czechoslovak Prime Minister) from their positions of power.
In February of 1951 a meeting of the CPC Central Committee approved a report on the ‘plot’, the substance of which had now been confirmed by a series of ‘confessions’ from those arrested at the turn of the year.
According to the report, Sling had become an agent of the Anglo-American intelligence service in the 1930s. In 1948 he had been instructed to “develop
nefarious activities (in Czechoslovakia) similar to Rajk’s in Hungary and Kostov’s in Bulgaria.”
Sling’s plan was to convene a special conference of the CPC at which his supporters would oust Slansky. The report continued:
“They already had a candidate in the wings (Marie Svermova) to take over the position of the General Secretary. This candidate had to know Sling as a cynic, a thug, a criminal, and a murderer of his own mother. … The party will therefore also treat M. Svermova without remorse as a criminal enemy.”
But even as this report was being adopted by the CPC Central Committee, with the full support of Slansky, a third script was being drafted. In this version Slansky was not a prime victim of the conspiracy but its prime mover.
And in the final version of the script Zionism would replace Titoism, Slovak bourgeois nationalism and Trotskyism as the conspiracy’s ideological driving force…
Read the rest here
No pensions sell-out says Gill George of Unite
Gill George, Unite Exec member [actually, ex-Exec: see Pete Gillard's comment below -JH], is a comrade that we at ‘Shiraz’ would have many differences with (she’s a member of the SWP for a start). But this contribution to the United Left email list is timely and eminently sensible:
On 1st December, we were collectively celebrating a successful mass strike.
We’d achieved superb working unity across 28 unions. We had massive public
support, with people increasingly glad to see anyone fighting against a
vicious Tory government. We had significant and growing support from private
sector workers – for the same reasons. We got the government rattled.
A few weeks on, and we’re in real trouble. November 30th needed to be the
first step in building a serious fight to roll back all the attacks we face
- and, I’d like to think, the first step in ditching a government that is
the enemy of workers. Instead, we’ve got the General Secretary of the TUC
and the General Secretary of the biggest public sector union desperately
scrabbling around to achieve any kind of a settlement (no matter what the
cost to their members and other workers). We can still pull this situation
back and rebuild this fight, but we’re not in the situation of strength of a
few weeks ago.
A discussion around whether or not Unite has sold out misses the point. Our
class is facing a massive betrayal that risks tearing the heart out of our
movement. The question for the Left in Unite is, are we fighting tooth and
nail to stop the betrayal from Barber and Prentis? Are we standing shoulder
to shoulder with PCS, and doing so publicly and proudly? Are we working
overtime to get the message to every one of our public sector members, ‘This
fight goes on and this union backs you every inch of the way?’. Any pretence
that nothing’s changed since the last Executive Council meeting (and since
the release of the excellent EC statement) just seems to me to be defying
reality.
Let’s think through the implications of what the Tories are about. There are
six million public sector workers in the UK. A majority are union members.
Almost all public sector workplaces are unionised and have trade union
recognition. Union density is close to four times higher than the average in
the private sector. It’s easy to miss the importance of this in a primarily
private sector union, but public sector workers are at the heart of the
trade union movement.
The attacks on public sector workers aren’t an accident. Like everyone else,
I go around saying that the Tories are trying to make workers pay for the
bankers’ crisis. The reality, though, is something rather more systematic
than this. We have a government that’s trying to smash the organised working
class. Think back to Thatcher, the Ridley plan, and the salami tactics of
taking on workers a section at a time – culminating in the catastrophic
defeat of the 84/85 miners strike. We’re now seeing Cameron’s equivalent.
Cameron’s rather bolder than Thatcher, with a plan of going in hard and
wiping out trade union organisation in the public sector core of our
movement. The plan will have been many years in the making. They’ve already
given the game away about what happens next: 710,000 public sector jobs
going, the imposition of regional and local pay, the removal of facility
time from public sector reps, a further two years of pay cuts, a continuing
assault on public sector services, and privatisation of the public sector on
a massive scale. This is no secret – they’re arrogant enough to boast about
it. If we don’t fight and win on pensions, we can be very certain what their
intentions are.
If the Tories get away with this level of destruction in the relatively well
organised public sector areas of our movement, does this have implications
for private sector and voluntary sector trade unionists? Surely, yes. The most deprived areas of the UK depend very heavily on the public sector both for jobs and to hold up pay rates. Bring in regional pay, ditch a load of public sector jobs, privatise everything that moves – this drives down pay across the board, for all workers. Slash spending for services – that cripples the voluntary sector too. Smash up facility time and national pay bargaining and decent working conditions in the public sector, and there’ll be plenty of private sector bosses who will follow that example. And maybe most important, what about the impact on confidence? If we allow a high profile defeat for six million public sector workers, there is a strong risk that the message goes out loud and clear to other workers, ‘We can’t win, there’s no point in fighting’.
As a Left union, we cannot allow this to happen. This is not about four separate trade disputes that happen to be on at the same time – Len McCluskey (and the TUC) recognised this when the November 30th strike was announced at Congress; our own Exec recognised this when it issued its supportive statement in early December. I know there’s an ongoing debate amongst EC members about whether or not to have an EC meeting to discuss this situation. Well, good God almighty, if our union can’t respond to the tragic betrayals we’re seeing in parts of the TU movement, and we can’t publicly ally ourselves with PCS, and we can’t give a strong public lead to the unions which are wavering – then surely our Exec has to sort this out. If this turns into a defeat, it is a massive, massive defeat for the trade union movement as a whole. It is unthinkable that we allow this to happen.
And what about the message that’s going out to our own public sector members? It’s certainly not as clear and sharp as the EC statement. In Health, we were able to exert enough lay pressure to get a last minute phone conference of NISC (National Industrial Sector Committee) members to discuss whether or not we should sign the ‘Heads of Agreement’ document. My strong impression is that we were put under pressure to sign. We had the frighteners put on us. The National Officer told us that this was the best we could get through negotiation, and if we didn’t sign up to it then and there, the Government had made it clear that they would impose a worse deal, remove protection for older workers coming up for retirement, and exclude Unite from any future negotiations.
The National Officer emphasised as strongly as she could that if we fought on, we would be isolated and on our own. It was down to lay members to challenge this line. NISC members argued that this was a dispute across the whole of the public sector, with huge opportunities for a stronger fight through unity of our sectors within Unite and with the other unions still up for a fight. This wasn’t the message from the National Officer. The resilience of our lay activists in the face of the bleak and defeatist line from the Officer was impressive. One after another, NISC members rejected what was on offer in very robust terms. The NISC Chair summed up the debate by saying, ‘It’s the overwhelming view – no, that deal is not acceptable’. The debate touched on the need to set a date for further strike action (but, interestingly, we were told by the National Officer that this wasn’t a matter for us, it was for the Executive to decide on further action).
I was genuinely disappointed by how that strong fighting spirit was watered down by the time it reached the ‘Action Alert’ a few days later. This reported a ‘lack of progress’ and that we had to ‘consult fully’, that we ‘will not be bounced’ etc. It didn’t say, as it should have done, ‘Nothing’s changed; we reject’. I hope lay members can hold the line in Health. We’re meeting again on 5th January for a special pensions meeting. I’m anticipating that we’ll face the same negative message as before at National Officer level. You know what? If we met in the knowledge that our own Executive Council was fighting like hell to maintain unity and ensure that no section of our members was left isolated and facing defeat, it might actually be quite helpful.
This dispute will have far reaching consequences, whether we win it or lose it. The outcome will shape the future for our movement as a whole for very many years to come. Should the EC call a special meeting to discuss how it can support and build the most important dispute most of us have faced in our lifetimes? Yes, of course it should.
Gill George
The real Ronald Searle
Britain’s greatest 20th Century cartoonist, Ronald Searle: 3 March 1920 – 30 December 2011.
Above: not just St. Trinian’s: this is the real Ronald Searle.
Martin Rowson, in the Graun:
“It is interesting to note how men of Searle’s generation – Spike Milligan being another notable example – translated the unimaginable trauma of the war into stuff like St Trinian’s or The Goon Show. And how distinctly unsettling it is to when you look at the drawings he produced in secret on the Burma Railway, and then see direct visual quotations of torture and beheadings in his later St Trinian’s cartoons” – The rest here.
Some justice, at last, for Stephen
I’ve nothing to add, for now anyway… the BBC report is here.
Stupid Gott on the Falklands
Every few years the preposterous “anti-imperialist” Richard Gott comes out with an article in the Guardian proposing that rights of the Falkland Islanders should be overridden in the name of Argentina’s geographically-based mini-imperialist “claim” to the islands.
The last time he came out with his anti-democratic proposal was on the 25th anniversary of the outbreak of the Falklands war, and he was in no doubt about the justice of Argentina’s claim:
“The Falklands belong to Argentina. They just happen to have been seized, occupied, populated and defended by Britain. Because Argentina’s claim is perfectly valid, its dispute with Britain will never go away,” he wrote in the Guardian of 2 April 2007. And in case anyone was in any doubt about Mr Gott’s attitude towards the Falklanders themselves: “At some stage, sovereignty and lease-back will have to be on the agenda again, regardless of the wishes of the islanders.”
I’m still rather proud of Shiraz‘s response at the time.
Gott’s most recent Falklands foray is rather less forthright, suggesting merely that “Argentina and Britain both have a good claim to the Islands,” and proposing that “the two countries should meet to negotiate a solution.” But the essential disregard for the rights of the inhabitants remains the same. As in 2007, though, at least one Guardian letter-writer nails Gott good and proper:
Richard Gott (Asleep over the Falklands, 23 December) criticises the Foreign Office for failing to address the vexed question of sovereignty. He adds, somewhat contentiously, that Argentina and Britain “both have a good claim to the Islands”. Given the United Nations-sanctioned principle of the self-determination of peoples, the strength of any sovereignty claim must surely rest with the populace of a territory. The British government should thus propose, via the UN, that referendums should be held at specific intervals to determine the wishes of the Falkland Islanders.
These referendums would offer the alternatives of accepting Argentine sovereignty, independence for the islands, remaining under British sovereignty or taking on any other sovereignty (Chilean?) that the islanders might choose. The British government would agree to be bound by whatever result ensued, and would put into effect any change of sovereignty indicated by a referendum as a matter of urgency.
L Warwick-Haller
Durley, Hampshire
Predictions for 2012: will there be an attack on Iran?
Uri Avnery is certain the answer is ‘no’:
EVERYBODY KNOWS the scene from school: a small boy quarrels with a bigger boy. “Hold me back!” he shouts to his comrades, “Before I break his bones!”
Our government seems to be behaving in this way. Every day, via all channels, it shouts that it is going, any minute now, to break the bones of Iran.
Iran is about to produce a nuclear bomb. We cannot allow this. So we shall bomb them to smithereens.
Binyamin Netanyahu says so in every one of his countless speeches, including his opening speech at the winter session of the Knesset. Ditto Ehud Barak. Every self-respecting commentator (has anyone ever seen a non-self-respecting one?) writes about it. The media amplify the sound and the fury.
“Haaretz” splashed its front page with pictures of the seven most important ministers (the “security septet”) showing three in favor of the attack, four against.
A GERMAN proverb says: “Revolutions that are announced in advance do not take place.” Same goes for wars.
Nuclear affairs are subject to very strict military censorship. Very very strict indeed.
Yet the censor seems to be smiling benignly. Let the boys, including the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense (the censor’s ultimate boss) play their games.
The respected former long-serving chief of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, has publicly warned against the attack, describing it as “the most stupid idea” he has ever heard”. He explained that he considers it his duty to warn against it, in view of the plans of Netanyahu and Barak.
On Wednesday, there was a veritable deluge of leaks. Israel tested a missile that can deliver a nuclear bomb more then 5000 km away, beyond you-know-where. And our Air Force has just completed exercises in Sardinia, at a distance larger than you-know-where. And on Thursday, the Home Front Command held training exercises all over Greater Tel Aviv, with sirens screaming away. All this seems to indicate that the whole hullabaloo is a ploy. Perhaps to frighten and deter the Iranians. Perhaps to push the Americans into more extreme actions. Perhaps coordinated with the Americans in advance. (British sources, too, leaked that the Royal Navy is training to support an American attack on Iran.)
It is an old Israeli tactic to act as if we are going crazy (“The boss has gone mad” is a routine cry in our markets, to suggest that the fruit vendor is selling at a loss.) We shall not listen to the US any more. We shall just bomb and bomb and bomb.
Well, let’s be serious for a moment.
Israel WILL NOT attack Iran. Period.
Some may think that I am going out on a limb. Shouldn’t I add at least “probably” or “almost certainly”?
No, I won’t. I shall repeat categorically: Israel Will NOT Attack Iran.
Since the 1956 Suez adventure, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered an ultimatum that stopped the action, Israel has never undertaken any significant military operation without obtaining American consent in advance.
The US is Israel’s only dependable supporter in the world (besides, perhaps, Fiji, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.) To destroy this relationship means cutting our lifeline. To do that, you have to be more than just a little crazy. You have to be raving mad.
Furthermore, Israel cannot fight a war without unlimited American support, because our planes and our bombs come from the US. During a war, we need supplies, spare parts, many sorts of equipment. During the Yom Kippur war, Henry Kissinger had an “air train” supplying us around the clock. And that war would probably look like a picnic compared to a war with Iran.
LET’S LOOK at the map. That, by the way, is always recommended before starting any war.
The first feature that strikes the eye is the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which every third barrel of the worlds seaborne oil supplies flow. Almost the entire output of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iraq and Iran has to run the gauntlet through this narrow sea lane.
“Narrow” is an understatement. The entire width of this waterway is some 35 km (or 20 miles). That’s about the distance from Gaza to Beer Sheva, which was crossed last week by the primitive rockets of the Islamic Jihad.
When the first Israeli plane enters Iranian airspace, the strait will be closed. The Iranian navy has plenty of missile boats, but they will not be needed. Land-based missiles are enough.
The world is already teetering on the verge of an abyss. Little Greece is threatening to fall and take major chunks of the world economy with her. The elimination of almost a fifth of the industrial nations’ supply of oil would lead to a catastrophe hard even to imagine.
To open the strait by force would require a major military operation (including “putting boots on the ground”) that would overshadow all the US misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can the US afford that? Can NATO? Israel itself is not in the same league.
BUT ISRAEL would be very much involved in the action, if only on the receiving end.
In a rare show of unity, all of Israel’s service chiefs, including the heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, are publicly opposing the whole idea. We can only guess why.
I don’t know whether the operation is possible at all. Iran is a very large country, about the size of Alaska, the nuclear installations are widely dispersed and largely underground. Even with the special deep penetration bombs provided by the US, the operation may stall the Iranian efforts – such as they are – only for a few months. The price may be too high for such meager results.
Moreover, it is quite certain that with the beginning of a war, missiles will rain down on Israel – not only from Iran, but also from Hizbollah, and perhaps also from Hamas. We have no adequate defense for our towns. The amount of death and destruction would be prohibitive.
Suddenly, the media are full of stories about our three submarines, soon to grow to five, or even six, if the Germans are understanding and generous. It is openly said that these give us the capabilities of a nuclear “second strike”, if Iran uses its (still non-existent) nuclear warheads against us. But the Iranians may also use chemical and other weapons of mass destruction.
Then there is the political price. There are a lot of tensions in the Islamic world. Iran is far from popular in many parts of it. But an Israeli assault on a major Muslim country would instantly unite Sunnis and Shiites, from Egypt and Turkey to Pakistan and beyond. Israel could become a villa in a burning jungle.
BUT THE talk about the war serves many purposes, including domestic, political ones.
Last Saturday, the social protest movement sprang to life again. After a pause of two months, a mass of people assembled in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. This was quite remarkable, because on that very day rockets were falling on the towns near the Gaza Strip. Until now, in such a situation demonstrations have always been canceled. Security problems trump everything else. Not this time.
Also, many people believed that the euphoria of the Gilad Shalit festival had wiped the protest from the public mind. It didn’t.
By the way, something remarkable has happened: the media, after siding with the protest movement for months, have had a change of heart. Suddenly all of them, including Haaretz, are sticking knives in its back. As if by order, all newspapers wrote the next day that “more than 20,000” took part. Well I was there, and I do have some idea of these things. There were at least 100,000 people there, most of them young. I could hardly move.
The protest has not spent itself, as the media assert. Far from it. But what better means for taking people’s minds off social justice than talk of the “existential danger”?
Moreover, the reforms demanded by the protesters would need money. In view of the worldwide financial crisis, the government strenuously objects to increasing the state budget, for fear of damaging our credit rating.
So where could the money come from? There are only three plausible sources: the settlements (who would dare?), the Orthodox (ditto!) and the huge military budget.
But on the eve of the most crucial war in our history, who would touch the armed forces? We need every shekel to buy more planes, more bombs, more submarines. Schools and hospitals must, alas, wait.
So God bless Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Where would we be without him?
Too much information
As everyone is saying, there was far too much news this year. Arab and North African uprisings, News International downfall, dictators and currencies collapsing – the media was a sound surround of important and exciting news.
This picture handily combines two news items into one (29th April and 1st May):-
More of two for the price of one:-
Listen, it wasn’t my idea to join the Euro
I predict riots if we close News of the World
To all you news consumers and news makers out there, Happy New Year.
Unimpressed TV
I haven’t watched Press TV myself except for the odd clip but what I hear about it is that it is a propaganda channel run from Tehran, and that to appear on it you have to be highly uncritical of the Iranian government. According to the journalist Dave Osler (comment 12):-
I am generally of the ‘bus company’ theory when it comes to media outlets. Who cares who runs the bus, so long as the route takes you where you want to go?
That is why I have in the past written for the Daily Express, and happily appear on rightwing TV and radio shows (Richard Littlejohn, Nick Ferrari etc) if they want a leftie on to spark debate.
If the media offers you a platform, take it, on the sole condition that you get your message across.
But the point is that Press TV doesn’t offer that kind of platform, It carefully selects Brit lefties that will say the sort of thing that complies with its editorial line. That sort of exposure isn’t worth having.
So it’s no surprise that Press TV employs islamist and theocracy pimps like the well-known hijabbed sister-in-law Lauren Booth, Yvonne Ridley and, of course, George Galloway.
Radio 4 ran a programme about Press TV on Thursday evening, which is well worth listening to.
I would have liked to have heard more about Press TV’s audience. I would guess that it would mostly be islamist sympathisers, and the kind of member of the far left who, a few decades ago, would have listened to Radio Moscow as their in-depth unbiassed news source. For example, here’s a thicko who comments round these parts (comment 5):-
Many Marxists with decades long experience in the movement have contributed to press tv, which in content and form, beats the superficial news churned out by media that Hitchens whored himself to.
George Galloway was invited to appear on the programme but did not take this chance to defend his employer. He’s not usually shy about appearing on the BBC. However he might have been asked impertinent questions which is not the kind of thing his heroes eg Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, would have put up with for a minute.
Lucky Jim’s morning after
More from that hangover expert, Kingsley Amis:
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eye-balls again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
Fom Lucky Jim (pub. 1953).
