Volume 37, Number 13 · August 16, 1990
The Theater of Cruelty
By Josef Skvorecky
Report on the Murder of the General Secretary
by Karel Kaplan, translated by Karel Kovanda
Ohio State University Press, 323 pp., $39.50
After the events in Europe during the past year, it may seem almost quaint to discuss the Stalinist show trials of the early 1950s—trials that presented to the world crimes against communism, socialism, and indeed 'humanity' in Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia—all allegedly committed by high Party members who confessed to selling out their brethren to the British and American imperialists. We have known for decades that the charges were trumped up, that interrogations were conducted using psychological and physical torture, that the victims sometimes felt that their love of the Party and its goals was unaffected by what was done to them, and that anti-Semitism had a large part in the entire process. The show trials and their horrors might seem relics of a vanished era.
Review, 5392 words
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