Black Book of Communism by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1999-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

12.6 The Trials of Communist Leaders

The persecution of fellow Communists is one of the most important episodes in the history of repression in Central and Southeastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Neither the international Communist movement nor any of its local branches ever ceased to denounce “bourgeois justice and legality” and fascist and Nazi repression. Undoubtedly, there were thousands of militant Communists who died as victims of Nazi and fascist repression during World War II.

But the persecution of Communists did not stop with the progressive installation of “people’s democracies,” when the “dictatorship of the proletariat” took over from the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”

In Hungary in 1945 the secret police imprisoned Pal Demeny, Jozsef Skolnik, and a number of their friends. All considered themselves to be Communists, and it was under that label that they had led underground resistance groups, to which they had often recruited young people and workers. In the industrial centers, membership in their groups was higher than that of Communist groups who had sworn allegiance to Moscow, and who considered competitors like Demeny to be Trotskyites or “deviationists.” When the moment of liberation finally arrived, Demeny met the same fate that befell those he had fought against, and he was imprisoned until 1957. In Romania the fate of §tefan Fori§, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party in the mid-1930s, was even more tragic. He was accused of being a police agent, kept under surveillance until 1944, and killed in 1946 with a blow from an iron bar. His mother, who had looked everywhere for him, was found drowned in a river in Transylvania with stones tied around her neck. Ceau§escu denounced the political assassination of Fori§ and his friends in 1968.

The examples of Demeny, Fori§, and others demonstrate quite clearly that for the people in charge, there were “good” Communists, who were in the Party and faithful to Moscow, and “bad” Communists, who refused to join what they saw as a Party with no independence. The principle varied over time in certain countries, but the dialectic of Communist persecution became considerably more complicated after 1948, when it moved inside the Party itself.

In late June 1948 the Cominform, which had been established in September 1947 and included all the Communist parties then in power except Albania, together with the two most powerful Communist parties in Western Europe— the French and Italian—roundly condemned Tito’s Yugoslavia and called for his overthrow. In the months that followed, “deviationism” (opposition to the reigning powers in Moscow) began to take shape as a new phenomenon in the Communist movement. The desire to be autonomous and independent of the center, which previously had been discernible only in small groups, now became the province of an entire state. One small Balkan state, in which the Communist Party’s monopoly on power had already been tried and tested, challenged the entire Communist empire. The increasingly tense situation offered new perspectives on the repression of Communists. Communists themselves, as well as citizens of

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