A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink

Author:Paul Hanebrink
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Jewish Studies, History, Europe, Eastern, Modern, 20th Century, Discrimination & Race Relations, Holocaust
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Czechoslovakia was not an obvious location for an antisemitic show trial. Unlike its Hungarian, Romanian, and Polish counterparts, the Czechoslovak Communist Party emerged from the war with genuine popular support. In the 1946 parliamentary election—the country’s last free election until 1990—the Communists received the most votes of any party. Nor had the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism been as deeply entrenched in interwar Czech political life as it had been in Hungary, Romania, or Poland, even if Czechoslovakia did have a tradition of political antisemitism. (The threat of Judeo-Bolshevism was an element, though never the most prominent one, in the ideology of the wartime Nazi-allied Slovak state.28) During World War II, Nazi officials spread antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik propaganda and promoted anti-Jewish sentiment in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the occupied Czech lands). Historians continue to debate the legacy of Nazi occupation for postwar Czech society, but however significant it may have been, it did not prevent millions of Czechs from voting for the Communists when they had the chance in 1946. As they consolidated power, Czechoslovak Communists did not need to fight the same intense perception of Communism as a Jewish plot that their comrades to the north and south did. Nevertheless, Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other leading figures in the Czechoslovak Communist Party were arrested in November 1952 on charges of conspiracy and made the subjects of an elaborate show trial. Eleven of the fourteen defendants, including Slánský himself, were consistently identified as Jews throughout the proceedings. For several weeks, radio broadcasts and newspaper reports in Czechoslovakia and across the entire Soviet bloc amazed audiences with startling revelations about the endless treachery committed by the defendants against the state and against the party they claimed to love. It would be the last in a series of great show trials that took place across Communist Eastern Europe between 1948 and 1953, and the only one built around the Jewish origins of the defendants.29

The Slánský trial was a stunning instance of Communist Party leaders using the figure of the (insincere, cunning, and deceitful) Jewish Bolshevik to attack one another. (In the West, Cold War liberals following the trial from afar took it as proof that Communism was no different from Nazism in its totalitarian hatred of Jews and Judaism.) Once general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and second in power only to president and party leader Klement Gottwald, the fallen Rudolf Slánský now abased himself with humiliating self-criticism to prove his deceit, asserting that he had always been a craven opportunist who had only acted like a good Communist to disguise his true intentions. Most important, each of the defendants was coerced by the interrogators to admit to a variety of treasonous acts that were all linked by their supposedly secret and powerful commitment to Zionism. The Jewish origins of Slánský and most of the other defendants were used as proof of their intention to sabotage Communism in Czechoslovakia. Slánský and his colleagues confessed to collaborating with international Zionist networks and

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