Men with Two Faces

Said Rudolf Slansky, ex-secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, in a tired, mechanical monotone: "I have committed a great crime against the Czechoslovak people, and I therefore face this trial before the people and the world. I have been an enemy of the Communist Party, and I created a conspiratorial movement to split the party. I also worked similarly within the army right back to the first Czech rising in 1942, when I was active against the interests of the Soviet Union and on behalf of the Benes regime. I am a person with two political faces. In reality, I have never been a Communist."

In reality a loyal Communist hatchet-man since early youth, Rudolf Slansky and 13 co-defendants were on trial last week in a courtroom of Prague's grim old Pankrac prison. The unhappy 14 stood up while a 14,000-word indictment was read against them. Then, one by one, they "confessed." They were broken, half-dead men, but they had been left with enough wit to repeat the intricate fables, involving dozens of well-known names inside & outside Czechoslovakia, which their merciless interrogators had impressed upon them. There were no non-Communist newsmen in Prague, much less in the courtroom; but the confessions were broadcast, in the defendants' own dead voices, over the Prague radio.

Slansky & Co. pleaded guilty to a standard list of crimes: high treason, conspiracy with non-Communist agents and spies, murder, espionage, sabotage, Titoism, Trotskyism. They also accused themselves of something new in Red purge trials: "Zionism," "Jewish bourgeois nationalism," "Jewish chauvinism." Slansky and ten others among the defendants are Jews.

Retribution for a Purger. In the Communist world, a hell which Dante might have found hard to describe, a kind of diabolical retribution lurks everywhere. Rudolf Slansky was one of the main architects of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948; after that, he reached the pinnacle of power. His main rival was President Klement Gottwald, who seemed immovably imbedded, like a great rock, in the Czech party.

Less than two years ago, Slansky purged one of Gottwald's close friends and loyal followers, Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis. Last week Clementis sat on the wooden benches with Slansky--a codefendant. Less than two years ago, Slansky engineered the spy trial of the American A.P. Correspondent William Oatis (who had been trying to find out what happened to Clementis) in the same courtroom of Pankrac prison. The same judges, prosecutor and "defense attorney" who served in the Oatis case last week confronted Rudolf Slansky. So it goes in the Communist inferno.

Slansky said that he had plotted with Gottwald's doctors in an attempt on the President's life; that he had planted "French agents, British agents, American agents, Yugoslav agents," and told them the secrets of the Czech armed forces and workers' organizations. He implicated, as foreign contacts, former British M.P. Konni Zilliacus, who once fellow-traveled with Stalin and now does with Tito, and Moshe Pijade, a Jewish ideologist in the Tito regime. He said he had given important jobs to "capitalist Jewish emigrants who returned to Czechoslovakia as imperialist agents." According to the indictment, he protected spies pointed out to him by Noel Field (a U.S. State Department emissary who disappeared three years ago) and by Noel's brother Hermann (who disappeared while looking for Noel).

He said he had murdered a comrade, Jan Sverma, and then recruited Sverma's widow--who apparently harbored no resentment--into the Slansky ring. (A few days later the widow appeared in the courtroom--as a witness, not yet a defendant--and admitted, in tears, that she had joined the conspiracy. Commented Prague radio: "This great traitor tried vainly to simulate remorse.")

How to Be Happy. Most of Slansky's co-defendants were members of his faction, appointed by him to various jobs in the government or party. But not Vladimir Clementis, a deadly enemy. In 1949, Clementis was representing his country at the U.N. in New York when he heard the first rumblings from home that Slansky had the knife out. On U.S. soil, Clementis felt safe. But President Gottwald sent Clementis' wife to New York to reassure him that he could safely come home. Clementis returned to Prague, and then found that Gottwald could not or would not shield him.

Last week Clementis identified himself as a spy and traitor, and said that, like Slansky, he had tried to kill Gottwald, his dear friend. He fingered John Foster Dulles of the U.S., Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb, and Ales Bebler of Yugoslavia as "spies." Ludvik Frejka, author of the Czechoslovak two-and five-year plans, took the stand to confess: "I sabotaged in such a way that there is still rationing of electricity and food in Czechoslovakia." The wife of accused former Deputy Foreign Minister Arthur London wrote the court that she at first believed her husband innocent, but after reading the indictment realized he was a traitor. She asked a "just verdict" against him, on behalf of her and their children.

Another defendant, Andre Simone, said that he had established liaison with agents of the "Overseas News Agency," identified as a branch of the Jewish Information Service, at a seafood restaurant in Manhattan between 45th and 46th Streets. Simone asked the court for hanging. "I can be happy," he said, "with no other penalty."

Listening with Horror. By week's end twelve of the 14 had finished their stories. Throughout their testimony, the theme of "Zionism" and "Jewish nationalism" recurred. Two Israeli Jews, Mordecai Oren and Shlomo Orenstein, who had been arrested many months ago while passing through Prague, were brought forth at the trial as witnesses and testified against the "Zionists." Orenstein said he knew of a plot hatched in 1947 by Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and Henry Morgenthau, with David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett of Israel, to plant Israeli spies in the Communist Balkans in return for U.S. favors to Israel.

In Israel, tens of thousands of people, with their radios tuned to Prague, listened in horror. The Israeli government was sure that Jews were made the new scapegoats of Czechoslovakia's economic failings and wretched living conditions; it is noted too that the Communist Rude Pravo ominously referred to Israel as "a base of aggression against the peace camp and the enslaved Arab nations." Israel prepared to protest, both in Prague through its ambassador there, and in the U.N. Even Israel's Al Hamishmar, newspaper of the slavishly pro-Cominform Mapam Party, suddenly disillusioned, called the accusations against Oren "fantastic and absurd," an attempt to smear "a persecuted people."

The Sun & the Abyss. Underneath the ugly sputterings of antiSemitism, the real motive force of the trial seemed to be the factional war between Gottwald and Slansky which has been waged for years. The U.S. State Department theorized that Moscow had been determined to smash one faction or the other to keep the Czech party malleable. But why Slansky instead of Gottwald? Gottwald had long been known as a nationalist first and a Communist second, whereas Slansky had always been the pure type of international Muscovite, without a trace of state allegiance. The only explanation was that at the moment, in the most civilized of Iron Curtain countries, housebroken nationalists like Gottwald could keep the people under control, but Muscovites like Slansky could not.

Yet Klement Gottwald and the younger men in his group--Prime Minister Zapotocky, Foreign Minister Siroy, Defense Minister Cepika (Gottwald's son-in-law) --knew they had had a narrow escape, that their turn might come any time. Truly they are, in Slansky's words, men of two faces. One face is turned toward the brazen sun of power and privilege, the other toward the abyss on whose brink they stand.

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