Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

of public pedagogy-by-example; a venerable Communist institution (the first such trials in the USSR dated to 1928) whose purpose was to illustrate and exemplify the structures of authority in the Soviet system. They told the public who was right, who wrong; they placed blame for policy failures; they assigned credit for loyalty and subservience; they even wrote a script, an approved vocabulary for use in discussion of public affairs. Following his arrest Rudolf Slánský was only ever referred to as ‘the spy Slánský’, this ritual naming serving as a form of political exorcism. 14 Show trials—or tribunals, in the language of Vyshinsky’s 1936 Soviet Manual of Criminal Investigation—were explicitly undertaken for the ‘mobilisation of proletarian public opinion’. As the Czechoslovak ‘Court Organisation Act’ of January 1953 baldly summed it up, the function of the courts was ‘to educate the citizens in devotion and loyalty toward the Czechoslovak Republic, etc.’ Robert Vogeler, a defendant at a Budapest trial in 1948, noted at the time: ‘To judge from the way our scripts were written, it was more important to establish our allegorical identities than it was to establish our “guilt”. Each of us, in his testimony, was obliged to “unmask” himself for the benefit of the Cominform Press and the radio.’