Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

during 1953 and early ’54, the Romanian Party conducted a series of secret trials of lesser fry accused of being Zionist spies in the pay of ‘imperial agents’. Victims ranging from genuine members of the (right-wing) Revisionist Zionists to Jewish Communists tarred with the Zionist brush were accused of illegal relations with Israel and of collaborating with Nazis during the war. They were sentenced to prison for periods varying from ten years to life. Finally Pătrăşcanu himself was tried in April 1954, after languishing in prison for six years; charged with spying for the British, he was found guilty and executed. Pauker was more fortunate: protected by Moscow (first by Stalin, later by Molotov) she was never directly targeted as a ‘Zionist’, and survived her September 1952 expulsion from the Party, disappearing into obscurity until her death in 1960. The Romanian Communist Party, smaller and more isolated than any of the other east European parties, had always been rent by infighting, and the defeat of the ‘rightist’ Pătrăşcanu and the ‘leftist’ Pauker was above all a factional victory for the viciously effective dictator Gheorghiu-Dej, whose governing style (like that of his successor Nicolae Ceauşescu) was morbidly reminiscent of old-style authoritarian rule in the Balkans. Jews were purged from Romanian party and government posts in these years, as they were in East Germany and Poland, two other countries where one faction of the Party could mobilize popular anti-Jewi...