Slansky at his trial

Rudolf Slansky was a lifetime member of the Communist party and rose to become the Secretary General of the Communist Party, the second most powerful position in the Czechoslovakia.   In November 1951 Slansky and 13 other people were arrested and charged with being Titoists.  What the exact causes of the decision to arrest Slansky and the others remain a mystery, but a year later in November 1952 he and the others were tried in court.  Ten of the 13 defendants including  Slansky were Jewish and the trail was full of Anti Semitic overturns.  Slansky was found guilty and hung a month later.

Stalin had always exhibited anti-Semitic tendencies, but Jews were active members of the Communist Party. The Soviet Union had supported the establishment of the State of Israel, but that support did not last long. In the postwar world, Stalin began to turn on the Jews. The first victim was the leader of the Anti-Fascist Committee ( which had galvanized Jewish support for the USSR during the war), Solomon MIkhoels, who was also involved in the Yiddish Theater. Starting in 1949, Pravda began printing articles against “cosmopolitans without fatherlands” and much more.

A show trial was organized against the Committee. Colonel Vladimir Komarov was in charge of the investigation and broadened the charges to include a vast conspiracy by Jews directed from Tel Aviv and Washington. All were convinced, and 14 were put to death.

Jews were initially prominent among the communist who returned to Eastern European countries when the Soviets liberated them and played a significant role in the initial governments. However, when Stalin turned on the Jews in the Soviet Union, purges also began in the satellite states. In Poland, East Germany, and Romania, Jews were accused of being cosmopolitan and purged from the party, with many fleeing westward.

In Czech, after the communist takeover, however, events played out differently. Initially, at the direction of Stalin, several Communist leaders, most prominently among them Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis, who was arrested in 1950 and accused of bourgeois nationalism; other Slovak communists were arrested and charged with supporting Titoism.

In early 1951 the head of the Soviet Security Services, Vladimir Beria, told the Czechs to concentrate their investigation on Jews and sent Komarov to lead the investigation. Stalin wanted a show trial of a prominent official, so they pushed to arrest Party Secretary General Rudolf Slansky, who was Jewish. Czech President Klement Gottwald was very reluctant to agree to the arrest of Slansky, a longtime colleague and friend. The KGB showed him false evidence that Slansky was tied to the CIA, and he finally agreed. On November 23, 1951, Slansky was arrested. Soon almost all of the prominent Jews in Czechoslovakia joined him in prison. The KGB extracted several false confessions, and in September 1952, an indictment was handed down. A show trial was held between November 20-27th, 1952. The prosecution highlighted the fact that the defendants the fact that all of the defendants. They were accused of connections to other Jews and Zionists. The trial was, of course, covered in government-controlled papers. The Communist Daily in Prague wrote an editorial “One trembles at disgust and repulsion at the sight of these cold, unfeeling beings. The Judas Slansky was betting on these alien elements, this rabble with a shady past. The writer concluded by saying that the defendants were “guided by in this criminal activity by Zionism, bourgeois Jewish nationalism, racial chauvinism. All those charged were found guilty, and eleven of the fourteen were sentenced to death. In December 1952, Slansky and the other defendants were hung.