Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

it is not coincidental that both the Plzeň and Berlin uprisings took place after Stalin’s death. In Stalin’s time the truly threatening challenge came, as it seemed, from within the Communist apparatus itself. This was the real implication of the Yugoslav schism, and it was in direct response to ‘Titoism’ that Stalin thus reverted to earlier methods, updated and adapted to circumstances. From 1948 through 1954, the Communist world underwent a second generation of arrests, purges and, above all, political ‘show trials’. The chief precedent for the purges and trials of these years was of course the Soviet Terror of the 1930s. Then, too, the main victims had been Communists themselves, the goal being to purge the Party of ‘traitors’ and other challenges to the policy and person of the General Secretary. In the 1930s the presumptive ringleader was Leon Trotsky—like Tito, a genuine Communist hero un-beholden to Stalin and with views of his own about Communist strategy and practice. The Terror of the thirties had secured and illustrated Stalin’s untrammeled power and authority, and the purges of the post-war years would serve a similar objective in Eastern Europe. But whereas the Moscow Trials of the 1930s, particularly the 1938 trial of Nikolai Bukharin, had been sui generis, theatrical innovations whose shock value lay in the grisly spectacle of the Revolution consuming not just its children but its very architects, the trials and purges of later decades were shameless copies,...