Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

and contradictions, more so even than in the USSR itself.

Each country was to trade bilaterally with the Soviet Union (another echo of Nazi-era requirements, with Moscow once again substituting for Berlin) and was assigned a non-negotiable role in the international Communist economy. Thus East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would supply finished industrial products to the USSR (at prices set by Moscow), while Poland and Romania were to specialize in producing and exporting food and primary industrial products. In return the Soviet Union would trade raw materials and fuel.

The Soviet model of the thirties, improvised to address uniquely Soviet circumstances of vast distance, abundant raw materials and endless, cheap, unskilled labor, made no sense at all for tiny countries like Hungary or Czechoslovakia, lacking raw materials but with a skilled industrial labor force and long-established international markets for high-value-added products. The Czech case is a particularly striking one. Before World War Two, the Czech regions of Bohemia and Moravia (already the industrial heartland of the Austro-Hungarian

Hungarian Empire before 1914) had a higher per capita output than France, specializing in leather goods, motor vehicles, high-tech arms manufacture and a broad range of luxury goods. Measured by industrial skill levels, productivity, standard of living and share of foreign markets, pre-1938 Czechoslovakia was comparable to Belgium and well ahead of Austria and Italy.

By 1956, Communist Czechoslovakia had not only fallen behind Austria, Belgium and the rest of Western Europe, but was far less efficient and much poorer than it had been twenty years earlier. In 1938, per capita car ownership in Czechoslovakia and Austria was at similar levels; by 1960 the ratio was 1:3. Even the products in which the country still had a competitive edge—notably small arms manufacture—no longer afforded Czechs any benefit, since they were constrained to direct their e...

Ostrava, identical to steelworks in Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the USSR, these represented for the Czechs not rapid industrialization but enforced backwardness (crash programs of industrialization based on the manufacture of steel were pursued in spite of Czechoslovakia’s very limited resources in iron ore). Following the one-time start-up benefits from unprecedented growth in primary industries, the same was true for every other sat...

There are two partial exceptions to this brief account of the economies of the Soviet bloc. While primitive industrialization was undertaken just as enthusiastically in Poland as elsewhere, land collectivization was not. Stalin seems to have grasped the impracticality of forcing Polish peasants onto collect...

Soviet caution when dealing with Poland (we shall have occasion to meet it again) was strictly instrumental. In marked contrast to the other subject peoples of eastern Europe, there were a lot of Poles, their capacity and propensity to rebel against Russian servitude was familiar to generations of Russian officers and b...

Poland’s use value to Moscow was above all as a buffer against German or Western aggression. It was desirable that Poland become socialist, but it was imperative that it remain stable and reliable. In return for Polish domestic calm Stalin was willing to tolerate a class of independent farmers, however inefficient and ideologically untidy, and a publicly active Catholic Church, in ways that would have been unimaginable further south or east. Polish universities were also left virtually intact, in contrast to the purges that stripped out the teaching staff of higher educational institutions in neighbouring Czechoslovakia and elsewhere.

The other exception, of course, was Yugoslavia. Until the Stalin-Tito split, Yugoslavia was, as we have seen, the most ‘advanced’ of all the east European states along the path to socialism. Tito’s first Five Year Plan outdid Stalin by aiming at a higher rate of industrial investment than anywhere else in the Soviet bloc. Seven thousand collective farms had been set up before collectivization had even begun in the other satellite states; and post-war Yugoslavia was well on the way to outdoing Moscow itself in the efficiency and ubiquity of its apparatus of repression. The partisans’ wartime security services were expanded into a full-scale police network whose task, in Tito’s words, was ‘to strike terror into the hearts of those who do not like this sort of Yugoslavia.’

Yugoslavia’s per capita income at the time of the break with Stalin was the lowest in Europe save for neighboring Albania; an already impoverished land had been beaten into penury in th...

The bitter heritage of Yugoslavia’s war experience was further complicated by its ethnic composition, the last genuinely multi-national state in Europe: according to the 1946 census Yugoslavia’s 15.7 million people comprised 6.5 million Serbs, 3.8 million Croats, 1.4 million Slovenes, 800,000 Muslims (mostly in Bosnia), 800,000 Macedonians, 750,000 Albanians, 496,000 Hungarians, 400,000 Montenegrins, 100,000 Vlachs and an...

In the initial months following the split with Stalin, Tito actually became more radical, more ‘Bolshevik’, as if to prove the legitimacy of his claim and the mendacity of his Soviet critics. But the posture could never have been sustained very long. Without external help, and faced with the very real prospect of Soviet invasion, he turned to the West for aid. In September 1949 the US Export-Import Bank loaned Belgrade $20 million. The following month Yugoslavia borrowed $3 million from the International Monetary Fund, and in December of that same year signed a trade agreement with Great Britain and received $8 million in credits. The Soviet threat forced Tito to increase his defense spending (as a share of Yugoslavia’s meager national income) from 9.4 percent in 1948 to 16.7 percent in 1950; the country’s munitions industries were moved for safety into the mountains of Bosnia (a matter of some consequence in the wars of the 1990s). In 1950 the US Congress, now convinced of Yugoslavia’s possible significance in the global Cold War, offered a further $50 million in aid under the Yugoslav Emergency Relief Act of 1950, and followed this in November 1951 with an accord that allowed Yugoslavia to receive military aid under the terms of the Mutual Security Act. By 1953 the Yugoslav national deficit on current account was fully covered by American aid; over the course of the years 1949–55 Tito’s aid from all Western sources amounted to $1.2 billion, of which just $55 million was ...

Western aid allowed the Yugoslav regime to continue favoring heavy industry and defense, as it had been doing before the 1948 split. But while the League of Yugoslav Communists retained all the reins of authoritarian power, the ultra-Bolshevism of the post-war years was abandoned. By the spring of 1951 only the postal service, together with rail, air and river transport, was left under federal (i.e. central government) control. Other services, and all economic enterprises, were in the hands of the separate republics. By 1954, 80 percent of agricultural land was back in private hands, following a March 30th 1953 decree permitting peasants to withdraw themselves and their land from the collective. Of the 7,000 collective farms, just 1,000 remained.

the last years of the war, under the cloak of Russian nationalism, Stalin expelled east to Siberia and Central Asia a variety of small nations from western and south-western border regions, the Caucasus in particular: Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Nalkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and others, in the wake of the Volga Germans deported in 1941. This brutal treatment of small nations was hardly new—Poles

and Balts had been exiled east by the hundreds of thousands between 1939 and 1941, Ukrainians in the 1930s and others before them, back to 1921.

The initial post-war trials of collaborators and traitors across the region echoed nationalist sentiment as well. Peasant party leaders in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were arrested, tried and shot between 1945 and 1947 for a mixed bag of real and imaginary crimes, ranging from Fascist sympathies through wartime collaboration to spying for the West; but in every case prosecutors took particular care to impugn their patriotism and credibility as representatives of the Bulgarian/Hungarian/Polish ‘people’. Socialists who refused the embrace of the Communist Party, like the Bulgarian Kr...

What is striking about the non-Communist victims of these early public trials is that—with the exception of those who really had thrown in their lot with the Germans and whose activities were thus common knowledge—they conspicuously refused to plead guilty or confess to their alleged ‘anti-national’ crimes. In the palpably rigged Sofia show trial of Agrarian Party leader Nikola Petkov and his ‘co-conspirators’, in August 1947, four out of the five accused proclaimed their innocence in spite of torture and false testimony.7 With the Yugoslav crisis of 1948, Stalin’s attitude shifted. As an alternative to Moscow, Belgrade had a certain appeal to many. Unlike Stalin, Tito posed no imperial threat (except within the local Balkan context); and by liberating his country and leading it to Communism with no help from Moscow, the Yugoslav leader had set an attractive precedent for any Communist in eastern Europe still tempted to ground a local revolution in national sentiment. Stalin was notoriously paranoid about threats to his monopoly of power; but that does not mean that he was altogether mistaken to see in Tito and ‘Tito-ism’ a genuine danger. Henceforward, therefore, nationalism (‘...

proletarians they claimed to represent. On the contrary: the destruction of the middle classes and the expulsion of ethnic minorities opened prospects of upward mobility for rural peasants, industrial workers and their children. Opportunities abounded, particularly at the lower rungs of the ladder and in government employ: there were jobs to be had, apartments to be occupied at subsidized rents, places in schools reserved for the children of workers and closed to the children of the ‘bourgeoisie’. Competence mattered less than political reliability, employment was guaranteed, and the burgeoning Communist bureaucracy sought out reliable men and women for everything from block organizer to police interrogator.8 Most of the population of Soviet eastern Europe, especially in the more backward regions, accepted their fate without prote...

On June 16th some 400,000 workers went on strike across East Germany, with the biggest demonstrations in Berlin itself.

As with the Plzeň protesters, the German workers were easily put down by the Volkspolizei, but not without cost. Nearly three hundred were killed when Red Army tanks were called in; many thousands more were arrested, of whom 1,400 were given long prison sentences. Two hundred ‘ringleaders’ were shot.

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,...

the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had used the courts to punish and close down the churches everywhere except Poland, where open confrontation with the Catholic Church was deemed too risky.

by the early 1950s there were eight thousand monks and nuns in Czechoslovak prisons.

Kostov’s case was unusual in that he was the only East European Communist who retracted his confession and protested his innocence at a public trial.

The public trials of Rajk and Kostov were only the tip of an iceberg of secret trials and tribunals set off by the hunt for Titoists in the Communist parties and governments of the region. The worst

affected were the ‘southern tier’ of Communist states closest to Yugoslavia: Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Hungary. In Hungary alone—where Stalin’s fear of creeping Titoism was marginally more credible given the proximity of Yugoslavia, the large Hungarian minority in the Vojvodina region of Serbia, and the close alignment of Hungarian and Yugoslav foreign policy during 1947—some 2,000 Communist cadres were summarily executed, a further 150,000 sentenced to terms of imprisonment and about 350,000 expelled from the Party (which frequently meant loss of jobs, apartments, privileges and the right to higher education).

Czechoslovakia, however, where the biggest show trial of them all was to be staged in Prague in November 1952. A major Czech show trial had been planned from 1950, in the immediate wake of the Rajk and Kostov purges. But by the time it was finally mounted, the emphasis had shifted. Tito was still the enemy and accusations of espionage for the West still figured prominently in the indictments. But of the fourteen defendants at the ‘Trial of the Leadership of the Anti-State Conspiracy Centre’, eleven were Jews. On the very first page of the charge sheet it was made abundantly clear that this was no accident. The ‘Trotskyite-Titoite bourgeois-nationalist traitors and enemies of the Czechoslovak people’ were also, and above all, ‘Zionists’.

Stalin was an anti-Semite and always had been. But until the Second World War his dislike for Jews was so comfortably embedded in his destruction of other categories of person—Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, Left- and Right-deviationists, intellectuals, bourgeois and so on—that their Jewish origin seemed almost incidental to their fate. In any case, it was a matter of dogma that Communism had no truck with racial or religious prejudice; and once the Soviet cause was attached to the banner of ‘anti-Fascism’, as it was from 1935 until August 1939 and again from June 1941, the Jews of Europe had no greater friend than Josef Stalin himself. That last claim is only partly ironic. The European Communist parties, especially those of central and eastern Europe, counted significant numbers of Jews among their members. The Jews of inter-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania were an oppressed and disliked minority. Young, secular Jews had few political options: Zionism, Bundism10, Social Democracy (where it was legal) or Communism. As the most uncompromisingly anti-national and ambitious of these, Communism had a distinctive appeal. Whatever its passing defects, the Soviet Union offered a revolutionary alternative at a time when central and eastern Europe appeared to be facing a choice between an authoritarian past and a Fascist future. The appeal of the USSR was further accentuated by the experience of war. Jews who found themselves in Soviet-occupied Poland after the Germans...

When the Communist parties took over in eastern Europe, many of their leading cadres were of Jewish origin. This was particularly marked at the level just below the top: the Communist police chiefs in Poland and Hungary were Jewish, as were economic policy makers, administrative secretaries, prominent journalists and Party theorists. In Hungary the Party leader (Mátyás Rákosi) was Jewish; in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland the Party leader was not Jewish but most of the core leadership group were. Jewish Communists throughout the Soviet bloc owed everything to Stalin. They were not much welcome in the countries to which they had returned, often after long exile: neither as Communists nor as Jews. Experience of war and occupation had made the local

populations even more resentful of the Jews than before (‘Why have you come back?’ one neighbor asked Heda Margolius when she escaped from the Auschwitz death march and made her way back to Prague at the very end of the war11); the eastern European Jewish Communists could be counted on, more perhaps than anyone else, to do Stalin’s bidding.

In the first post-war years Stalin displayed no hostility to his Jewish subordinates. At the United Nations the Soviet Union was an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist project, favoring the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East as an impediment to British imperial ambitions. At home Stalin had looked favorably on the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, formed during the war to mobilize Jewish opinion in the USSR and (especially) abroad behind the Soviet struggle against the Nazi...

sought and accepted help from any likely quarter, would translate into easier times after victory. In fact, the opposite happened. Before the war had even ended Stalin, as we have seen, was exiling whole nations to the east and doubtless harbored similar plans for the Jews. As in central Europe, so in the lands of the Soviet Union: even though Jews had lost more than anyone else, it was easy and familiar to blame those same Jews for everyone else’s sufferings. The wartime invocation of the banner of Russian nationalism brought Soviet rhetoric a lot closer to the Slav-exclusivist language of old-time Russian anti-Semites; this was certainly not to the regime’s disadvantage. For Stalin ...

For various reasons it had always suited the Soviet purpose to downplay the distinctively racist character of...

Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar was officially commemorated as the ‘murder of peaceful Soviet citizens’, just as the post-war memorial at Auschwitz confined itself to general references to ‘victims of Fascism’. Racism had no place in the Marxist lexicon; dead Jews were posthumously assimilated into the same local communities that had so disliked them when they were alive. But now the presumptively cosmopolitan qualities of Jews—the international links from which Stalin had hoped to benefit in the dark months following the German attack—began once more to be held against them as the battle lines of the Cold War settled into place and international wartime contacts and communications became in Stalin’s eyes a retroactive liability. The first victims were the Jewish leaders of the wartime Anti-Fascist Committee itself. Solomon Mikhoels, its prime mover and a major figure in Russia’s Yiddish Theatre, was murdered on January 12th 1948. The arrival in Moscow of Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir on September 11th 1948 was the occasion for spontaneous outbursts of Jewish enthusiasm, with street demonstrations on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and chants of ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ outside the Israe...

Meanwhile the anti-Semitic tide was gathering strength in the satellite states. In Romania, where a substantial part of the Jewish population had survived the war, an anti-Zionist campaign was launched in the autumn of 1948 and sustained with varying degrees of energy for the next six years. But the size of the Romanian Jewish community and its links to the United States inhibited direct attacks on it; indeed the Romanians for some time toyed with the idea of letting their Jews leave—applications for visas were allowed from the spring of 1950 and not halted until April 1952, by which time 90,000 Romanian Jews had left for Israel alone.

Plans for a show trial in Romania centred on the (non-Jewish) Romanian Communist leader Lucretius Pătrăşcanu. Pătrăşcanu’s publicly voiced doubts over rural collectivization made him a natural candidate for a Romanian ‘Rajk trial’ based on charges of pro-Titoism, and he was arrested in April 1948. But by the time his interrogators were ready to bring him to trial the goalposts had moved and Pătrăşcanu’s case was bundled with that of Ana Pauker. Pauker was Jewish; the daughter of a Jewish shochet (a ritual slaughterer) from Moldavia she was the first Jewish government minister in Romania’s history (and the first female foreign minister anywhere in the world). She was also a notorious hard-liner in doctrinal and policy matters, which made her an exemplary target for a Romanian leadership trying to curry favor with the local population.

Stalin’s death aborted the plans of Romanian Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej to stage a show trial...

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 ...

In the spring of 1951 Soviet Police Chief Beria instructed the Czechs to shift the emphasis of their investigations from a Titoist to a Zionist plot. From now on the whole enterprise was in the hands of the Soviet secret services—Colonel Komarov and another officer were sent to Prague to take the investigations in hand, and the Czech security police and Communist leadership received their orders from them. The need for a prominent victim had focused Soviet attention on the second figure in the Czech hierarchy after President Klement Gottwald: Party General Secretary Rudolf Slánský. Unlike Gottwald, who was a serviceable figurehead and pliable Party loyalist, Slánský, though eminently Stalinist (like Rajk before him), was a Jew.

At first Gottwald was reluctant to have Slánský arrested—the two of them had worked closely together in purging their colleagues over the past three years and if the General Secretary was implicated, Gottwald himself might be next. But the Soviets insisted, presenting forged evidence linking Slánský to the CIA, and Gottwald gave way. On November 23rd 1951 Slánský was arrested; in the days that followed prominent Jewish Communists still at liberty followed him into prison. The security services now set themselves the task of extracting confessions and ‘evidence’ from their many prisoners in order to construct a major case against Slánský and his collaborators. Thanks to a certain amount of resistance by their victims (notably the former General Secretary himself) even in the face of barbaric torture, this task took them the best part of a year. Finally, by September 1952, the indictment was completed. The text of the confessions, the indictment, the predetermined sentences and the script of the trial were then sent to Moscow for Stalin’s personal approval. Back in Prague a ‘dress rehearsal’ of the full trial was conducted—and tape-recorded. This was to provide an alternative text for ‘live transmission’ in the unlikely event that one of the defendants retracted his confession in open court, like Kostov. It was not needed. The trial lasted from November 20th to November 27th 1952. It followed well-established

precedent: the accused were charged with having done and said things they had not (on the basis of confessions extracted by force from other witnesses, including their fellow defendants); they were blamed for things that they had done but to which new meanings were attached (thus three of the accused men were charged with having favored Israel in trade deals, at a time when this was still Soviet policy); and prosecutors charged Clementis with having met with Tito (‘the executioner-of-the-Yugoslav-people and lackey-of-imperialism Tito’)—at a time when Clementis was Czechoslovakia’s Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs and Tito was still in Soviet good graces. Two characteristics marked this trial out from all those preceding it. Prosecutors and witnesses repeatedly emphasized the Jewishness of...

‘Zionist origin’) served as a presumption of guilt, of anti-Communist, anti-Czech intentions. And the language of the prosecutors, broadcast over Czechoslovak radio, harked back to and even improved upon the crude vituperation of Prosecutor Vyshinsky in the Moscow Trials: ‘repulsive traitors’, ‘dogs’, ‘wolves’, ‘wolfish successors of Hitler’ and more in the same vein. It was also recapitulated in the Czech press. On the fourth day of the trial the Prague Communist daily Rudé Právo editorialized thus: ‘One trembles with disgust and repulsion at the sight of these cold, unfeeling beings. The Judas Slánský’, the paper continued, was betting on ‘these alien elements, this rabble with its shady past.’ No Czech, the writer explained, could have committed such crimes: ‘only cyn...

Eleven of the fourteen accused were sentenced to death and executed, three were condemned to life imprisonment. Addressing the National Conference of the Czechoslovak Communist Party a month later, Gottwald had this to say about his former comrades: ‘Normally bankers, industrialists, former kulaks don’t get into our Party. But if they were of Jewish origin and Zionist orientation, little attention among us was paid to their class origin...

the Prague proceedings were also intended as an overture to the arrest of the Soviet Jewish doctors whose ‘plot’ was announced by Pravda on January 13th 1953. These Jewish physicians—‘a Zionist terrorist gang’ accused of murdering Andrei Zdanov, conspiring with the ‘Anglo-American bourgeoisie’, and advancing the cause of ‘Jewish nationalism’ in connivance with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (as well as the late ‘bourgeois Jewish nationalist’ Solomon Mikhoels)—were to go on trial within three months of the Slánský verdicts. Indications are that this trial in its turn was envisaged by the Kremlin as a preamble and excuse for mass round-ups of Soviet Jews and their subsequent expulsion to Birobidzhan (the ‘homeland’ in the east assigned to Jews) and Soviet Central Asia, where many Polish Jews had previously been sent between 1939 and 1941: the MVD publishing house had printed and prepared for distribution one million copies of a pamphlet explaining ‘Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country.’ But even Stalin appears to have hesitated (Ilya Ehrenburg warned him of the devastating impact a show trial of the Jewish doctors would have upon Western opinion); in any case, before he could make a decision he died, on March 5th 1953.

Stalin’s prejudices do not require an explanation: in Russia and Eastern Europe anti-Semitism was its own reward. Of greater interest are Stalin’s purposes in mounting the whole charade of purges, indictments, confessions and trials. Why, after all, did the Soviet dictator need trials at all? Moscow was in a position to eliminate anyone it wished, anywhere in the Soviet bloc, through ‘administrative procedures’. Trials might seem counter-productive; the obviously false testimonies and confessions, the unembarrassed targeting of selected individuals and social categories, were hardly calculated to convince foreign observers of the bona fides of Soviet judicial procedures. But the show trials in the Communist bloc were not about justice. They were, rather, a form

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:...

But the ‘public’ were not being asked to believe what they heard; they were merely being trained to repeat it.

The advantage of the confession, in addition to its symbolic use as an exercise in guilt-transferal, was that it confirmed Communist doctrine. There were no disagreements in Stalin’s universe, only heresies; no critics, only enemies; no errors, only crimes. The trials served both to illustrate Stalin’s virtues and identify his enemies’ crimes.

Stalin in his last years seems genuinely to have expected a war; as he explained in an ‘interview’ in Pravda in February 1951, a confrontation between capitalism and communism was inevitable, and now increasingly likely. From 1947 through 1952 the Soviet bloc was on a permanent war footing: arms production in Czechoslovakia increased seven-fold between 1948 and 1953, while more Soviet troops were moved to the GDR and plans for a strategic bomber force drawn up. Thus the arrests and purges and trials were a public reminder of the coming confrontation; a justification for Soviet war fears; and a strategy (familiar from earlier decades) for slimming down the Leninist party and preparing it for combat.