RFE's coverage of the Slánský trial

The Slánský trial began on 20 November 1952. According to the indictment, Slánský and his thirteen co-defendants had formed a ‘Trotskyite, Titoist, Zionist, bourgeois nationalist’ conspiracy whose roots went back decades. Their ultimate aim was to ‘renew capitalism and drag Czechoslovakia into the imperialist camp, destroying its independence’.Footnote ⁶ As in other show trials, the accused did not defend themselves but instead confessed to all the charges in ways that emphasised their own guilt and shameless criminality. The verdict was pronounced on 27 November, immediately after the completion of the trial. Eleven of the defendants, including Rudolf Slánský, were sentenced to death; the other three received life sentences. Less than a week later, on 3 December 1952, Rudolf Slánský and ten of his fellow ‘conspirators’ were dead.

The blatant anti-Semitism of the Slánský trial makes it stand out from the other show trials conducted in Eastern Europe during this era. Eleven of the defendants were of Jewish background and their Jewishness was integral to their supposed crimes. Their traitorous conspiracy was described as ‘Zionist’, but this term was used in ways that implied Zionism was simply an international Jewish conspiracy. As one example, the indictment described the three defendants with no Jewish heritage as ‘Czech’ or ‘Slovak’, while the other eleven were listed as ‘of Jewish origin’, implying that their only affiliation could be with a Jewish identity.Footnote ⁷ In another illustration, Rudolf Slánský testified that he had protected Zionist organisations in Czechoslovakia by organising a campaign against anti-Semitism. In the trial, attacking anti-Semitism was itself turned into a traitorous act.Footnote ⁸

Like other show trials, the Slánský trial was meant to be a public statement, and it was covered intensively in the Czechoslovak media.Footnote ⁹ The proceedings were broadcast on Czechoslovak radio and transcripts appeared in all the newspapers. Interest was tremendous; newspapers across the country quickly sold out. The story was instantly the subject of informal conversation in the workplace and on the street and was more formally discussed at official workplace meetings.Footnote ¹⁰ Radio Free Europe also gave the trial a prominent place in its broadcasts.Footnote ¹¹ The trial was the topic of many regularly scheduled programmes during the period from 20 November to 2 December 1952; special commentaries and roundtables about the trial were also inserted into the schedule periodically each day.Footnote ¹²

From the moment the trial began, RFE commentators claimed that it was a staged event with all the lines written out in advance.Footnote ¹³ Programme scripts described the trial as a ‘cynical comedy’ or a ‘pompous theatrical performance serving certain propaganda purposes’ written out of an incomprehensible ‘ideological stew’.Footnote ¹⁴ Broadcasts continually pointed out moments where the testimony taxed the credulity of the listener. The ‘Night Commentary’ programme on 21 November asserted that the charges of the indictment were ‘so fantastic, one would have to be out of one's mind to believe, even for a moment only, that they, or only parts of them, are true’.Footnote ¹⁵ On another programme a few days later, a commentator declared it was ‘humiliating and insulting’ to think that trial organisers could expect anyone in civilised and cultured Czechoslovakia to believe such an outrageous collection of charges and testimony. ‘The stupidest communist housekeeper in Prague could not be convinced by the language of this trial’, he claimed.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet, while they wanted to emphasise the spurious nature of the proceedings, RFE broadcasters were careful not to exonerate the defendants or portray them as victims. From RFE's perspective, Slánský and the others were guilty, albeit not of the crimes they had been accused of committing. As the 21 November ‘Night Commentary’ programme continued, ‘At the same time, we are not nearly foolish or ambitious enough to want to defend Slánský or his associates. They are getting a taste of what they themselves have been dishing out, directly or indirectly, to innumerable victims of the communist regime. . .’Footnote ¹⁷ These men, insisted RFE, were not traitors to the party or its government. Indeed, in the words of one RFE writer, they were ‘the cream of the communists’, men who had idealistically dedicated their lives to building socialism.Footnote ¹⁸ For RFE, the defendants’ real crime was not that they had betrayed communism, but that they believed in it.

According to RFE commentators, the Slánský trial was best understood as an indictment of communist policy as a whole, particularly its economic policy. A substantial portion of the charges against the accused was economic in nature; it was alleged that the defendants had systematically sabotaged the planned economy and caused shortages across the country. From RFE's perspective, this part of the indictment was not far off the mark. The defendants had in fact helped to eviscerate the Czechoslovak economy, although, RFE claimed, they had done so as communists, not traitors. Broadcasts declared that President Gottwald and the rest of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (Komunistická Strana Československa or KSČ) were equally culpable and would ideally also be on trial for presiding over the ‘sovietisation’ of Czechoslovakia.Footnote ¹⁹

RFE's coverage of the trial was based on the assumption that communism was alien to the Czechoslovak nation, even if there were a few Czechoslovak communists. Broadcasts claimed that the trial was proof that the KSČ was completely subservient to Moscow. Taking this line had been an official policy for the Czechoslovak desk since February 1951.Footnote ²⁰ Several programmes suggested that only the Soviets could have constructed such a trial and expected Czechoslovaks to believe it. That the trial was taking place at all showed the extent to which Moscow was making policy in Prague. In RFE scripts, ‘Moscow’ had a complicated set of meanings. It primarily referred to Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But it was also used ethnically, to indicate an ‘Asiatic’ and alien backwardness quite out of character for European Czechoslovakia. As one programme declared, ‘the soul of Czechoslovakia should be transformed into the soul of Ivan, the soul of a primitive and a barbarian . . . It is to merge with Asia, with the tradition of Genghis Khan’.Footnote ²¹ Such comments painted a picture of Czechoslovakia as a Russian colony, subject to a sort of reverse civilising mission. The Slánský trial, for RFE, was a vivid example of how Russia (Ivan) would lead Czechoslovakia backward into destitution and ruin, rather than forward towards a better future.

It was also Moscow, charged RFE, that made anti-Semitism into such a prominent feature of the Slánský trial. Czechoslovaks would never have stooped to such ‘barbarism’. In its broadcasts, RFE came out strongly against the anti-Semitic rhetoric used in the trial, which they declared showed the depths of communist indecency, desperation and allegiance to Moscow. A special policy guidance written to provide the parameters for coverage of the trial noted that ‘even in Westernized Czechoslovakia public opinion may take momentary satisfaction in the offering up of Jewish scapegoats’, and directed script writers to counter this tendency.Footnote ²² Accordingly, RFE commentators urged listeners to reject the trial's not-so-subtle hint that Jews were responsible for all of Czechoslovakia's problems, remarking that ‘decent people have nothing in common with this Red anti-Semitism’.Footnote ²³ Instead, programme scripts emphasised that shortages and other economic issues were caused by the inefficiencies of socialist central planning and the rapacious demands of the Soviets. Another commentary claimed that the Czechoslovak Communist Party ‘is afraid of the anger of the people, therefore it would very much like to mislead them from the right way and turn them against the Jews’. However, the programme continued, it was really ‘the communists [who] are responsible for the present misery and slavery’.Footnote ²⁴

Several programmes claimed that the communists were taking pages from Hitler's playbook, again emphasising their distance from true Czechoslovaks. One programme charged that ‘Gottwald's clique’ was adopting Nazi methods so well that ‘Goebbels would envy Gottwald the skill with which he applies himself to the task. If he could have anticipated this development, he would never have committed suicide in besieged Berlin, but calmly waited for the moment his valuable, specialised knowledge could be put to proper use again.’Footnote ²⁵ The episode of the programme ‘Other Side of the Coin’ broadcast on 25 November, which was devoted to a light-hearted analysis of the local Czechoslovak press, began by commenting that readers of Rudé Právo, the Czechoslovak Communist Party daily, must be wondering if they had not picked up Der Stürmer (the notoriously anti-Semitic newspaper from Nazi Germany edited by Julius Streicher) by mistake. Another programme noted that many of the phrases echoing around the courtroom in Pankrác, where the trial was taking place, could have come straight from Hitler's mouth, including ‘Jewish capitalism’ and ‘international Jew[ry]’.Footnote ²⁶

RFE stressed on numerous occasions that the anti-Semitism of the trial was not authentically Czechoslovak. As one programme stated, ‘The one thing the Prague regime seems to have forgotten is that this trial is not staged in illiterate Russia or in some backward part of, say, Romania, but in Czechoslovakia, a country where people have not yet forgotten the Masaryk tradition’.Footnote ²⁷ The writer here hoped to appeal to a particular set of ideas about the Czech national character identified with Tomáš Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's first president. Many Czechs liked to believe that their nation was historically conditioned to be democratic and progressive, as Masaryk had often claimed. Masaryk had taken a strong public stand against anti-Semitism in 1899, when he defended a Bohemian Jew, Leopold Hilsner, who had been convicted of murdering a young Christian woman. Masaryk claimed that Hilsner had been the victim of anti-Semitic prejudice and deserved a new trial, for which he was roundly criticised by many. But while Masaryk did courageously reject anti-Semitism, his attitude towards Jews was, in the words of historian Hillel Kieval, ‘highly ambiguous and, at times, overtly negative’.Footnote ²⁸ He openly admitted having an emotional aversion to Jews. This did not prevent RFE from invoking his legacy several times in an attempt to prove that anti-Semitism was a betrayal of the values of pre-communist Czechoslovakia. One programme claimed that Prague was the least anti-Semitic of East European capitals and invoked Masaryk's work in rooting anti-Semitism out of its back alleys. It only showed, the programme claimed, that Moscow had to be behind the trial, since even Klement Gottwald was not stupid enough to have thought launching such an anti-Semitic show in Prague would really play well there.Footnote ²⁹

But despite RFE's protestations, anti-Semitism had deep roots in Czechoslovak politics and Masaryk's influence could not erase prejudices about Jews from Czechoslovak culture.Footnote ³⁰ Anti-Semitism was commonplace in Bohemian politics during the late nineteenth century. While some have claimed that Czech anti-Semitism during that period was nationally rather than racially motivated and was therefore somehow more rational and less troubling than German and French anti-Semitism, historian Michal Frankl has recently challenged this assertion, arguing that Czech attacks on Jews in the late nineteenth century were not in fact so different from anti-Semitism elsewhere.Footnote ³¹ Anti-Semitism was indeed unusually rare in Czechoslovak politics and public life between 1920 and 1938, but after the Munich conference in 1938 it burst forth with a vengeance, suggesting that anti-Semitic attitudes and assumptions had never really gone away, but only remained submerged while times were good.Footnote ³² During the Second World War, anti-Semitic discourse permeated both Czech and Slovak public spheres. While some may have seen this as a Nazi imposition, others willingly joined in.Footnote ³³ Czechoslovak responses to the anti-Semitic content of the Slánský trial can only be evaluated in this historical context, which RFE hoped to forget.

While RFE did vehemently decry the anti-Semitic cast of the Slánský trial, even some of its own broadcasts show complicated and contradictory attitudes towards Czechoslovak Jews. In one special commentary devoted to the issue, the script-writer emphasised the contributions Jews had made to Western culture and knowledge, from the Ten Commandments to Einstein's theory of relativity, the philosophy of Spinoza and the poetry of Heinrich Heine. But while laudatory, this script presented Jews as a separate and distinct national group, just as the trial tried to present Slánský and his fellow defendants as aliens and foreigners. This effect was heightened as the script went on to praise the Jewish role in the development of banking, commerce and industry, in which, the script said, ‘they built up an economic position of great strength’. This meant, it continued, that the industrialisation of central and south-eastern Europe was in great part accomplished by Jews.Footnote ³⁴ While this was undoubtedly meant to be complimentary, it could certainly feed into existing prejudices about supposed Jewish wealth and could also serve as fodder for the belief in an international Jewish conspiracy, which RFE had elsewhere ridiculed.

The same script then tried to explain why so many Jews had been drawn to communism. The author put this down to local circumstances in Eastern Europe, where ‘absolutist’ regimes denied civil rights to their inhabitants, especially Jews, and where there was a strong tradition of anti-Jewish violence. Men such as Trotsky and Zinoviev, as well as Slánský and his fellow defendants, had turned to Marxism ‘as a substitute for Western, bourgeois revolution based on human rights’. Their backgrounds, the script implied, made them ignore the need to protect individual human rights and freedoms. Now, they found themselves in a position where they could use those rights, but they did not exist.Footnote ³⁵ This tale presented the accused as tragic figures and linked their attraction to communism to specific historical circumstances, rather than to any ethnic characteristics or ‘Jewish’ proclivities. It did not blame Jews for the evils of communism. Yet, at the same time, it emphasised the supposedly particularly strong link between Jews and communism, just as it stressed the Jewish role behind the development of industrial capitalism. It would certainly be possible for listeners who were already sympathetic to seeing Jews as the pernicious forces behind one or both of those systems to ignore the full content of the script and find that this commentary actually confirmed their feelings about Jews.

RFE could also trade in anti-Semitic stereotypes of its own. The thin line RFE attempted to walk – between protesting at the anti-Semitism in the trial and denying the innocence of the accused – frayed during its coverage of Bedřich Geminder. Geminder had spent decades working for the Comintern in Berlin and Moscow before returning to Czechoslovakia in 1946. The trial painted Geminder as a foreigner, emphasising his supposedly weak Czech language ability. In his testimony, Geminder admitted attending a German-language school as a child, which in the Czech context would have been seen as a typical example of how Jews opposed the Czech nation and instead supported Bohemia's German-speaking minority. Geminder was chided for not speaking any language properly (like ‘a typical cosmopolitan’ remarked the prosecutor).Footnote ³⁶ He testified that when Slánský invited him to come back to Czechoslovakia after the war and work for the KSČ, he at first demurred, because of his poor Czech. But, he said, Slánský told him not to worry about that, adding that Geminder might ‘Czechify’ his name ‘as other cosmopolitans had already done’ implying a hidden army of traitorous Jews lurking inside the Czechoslovak community.Footnote ³⁷ In reporting on Geminder's testimony, RFE did not decry the anti-Semitism at work, but instead exacerbated it. One script called Geminder an ‘unattractive prospect of a little man with ginger hair’, emphasising his Jewishness.Footnote ³⁸ It also did not dispute the way he had been characterised as an alien by virtue of his poor Czech. Indeed, an RFE commentator only underscored the comments made in the trial itself when he claimed that Geminder could not speak any language properly, except ‘the language of his Muscovite masters’. While RFE did allow that Geminder was a convinced communist and not simply an opportunist, they still depicted him as a specifically Jewish stooge of Moscow.Footnote ³⁹

The outlook of RFE was perhaps best expressed in a commentary by Jiří Kovtun broadcast after the trial had concluded, on 2 December 1952. Kovtun spoke in response to an interview conducted with Eliška Svobodová, a worker who had received the Order of the Republic, presumably for her work discipline and prowess in meeting her quotas. Svobodová told a reporter that she had been transfixed by the trial. She found it hard to believe that there were not more traitors lurking around and she looked forward to the day when they would also be put to death. She declared that she would be happy to work even harder now, to do her part in defending the People's Democracy from such evildoers. Kovtun's reaction to Svobodová was to portray her as deformed and dehumanised by her immersion in communist political culture. Her constant exposure to slogans and lies, he said, had turned her into an embodiment of the Order of the Republic and she spoke only in its name. A woman who lived in a different environment, Kovtun said, would be talking about things such as the upcoming Christmas holiday and not have any interest ‘in such a horrible show’. Kovtun hypothesised that if he could only talk to ‘the human being free from propaganda’, he could convince her that the trial was a fraud. And if she only knew the truth, he said, Svobodová would not look forward to more executions or think that rooting out traitors would bring happiness to her children.Footnote ⁴⁰ Kovtun wanted to believe that Svobodová's true soul was moulded in the tradition of Masaryk and his progressive democratic ideology. If he could get her away from communist lies, she would see the truth. But this attitude assumed that anti-Semitism was itself not an indigenous Czechoslovak political discourse and that its manifestation was solely of communist manufacture.

The response to the Slánský trial within Czechoslovakia

If RFE wanted to convince its listeners that the trial was played out according to a prewritten script, the KSČ had a stake in maintaining the trial's authenticity. In the Czechoslovak domestic media, Slánský and his accomplices were heinous traitors who had been caught in the very nick of time. Now that their sabotage had been uncovered, Czechoslovakia could get back on the road to its glorious socialist future. In the West, most agreed with RFE that the Slánský trial was staged. Inside Czechoslovakia, the reaction was more complicated and the domestic response to the trial was not always centred around its veracity. In what follows, I discuss ‘reactions’ to the trial rather than ‘beliefs’ about it. I argue that sources from Czech archives can help us access the spectrum of public reaction to the trial. But while they can tell us what people said about events, they cannot confirm whether or not people believed what they said. In many instances, we might find it likely to assume a congruence between reaction and belief, but there is no concrete evidence for such an assumption. So, rather than speculate about belief, I shall discuss reactions to the trial and how they show the ways in which people accepted or contested the trial narrative.

The sources used here for examining the internal reaction to the Slánský trial are primarily reports prepared by the State Security police (Státní bezpečnost or StB) based on their observation of the population, along with letters sent to KSČ offices and information bulletins prepared for the highest KSČ officials. Historians have debated the usefulness of secret police surveillance reports as sources, particularly in communist regimes. I argue, along with historian Kevin McDermott, that in this case StB reports are very instructive, if not definitive.Footnote ⁴¹ The archives contain both summary analyses of popular opinion and dispatches that came in daily during the trial from each of the StB regional offices. These regional reports were usually comprised mostly of individual bits of intelligence garnered by StB agents or officers. They do not make claims about what ‘most people’ believe but instead relate what specific individuals have said; many reports are little more than lists of named individuals with their reported comments about the case and often contain responses that differed significantly from the way the trial was portrayed in the press and in official pronouncements. While the nature of these reports is impressionistic rather than statistical, different kinds of reactions are reported repeatedly on different days in different localities. The reports show a consistent spectrum of response to the trial, although they do not tell us the percentage of the population that agreed with any particular category of reaction.Footnote ⁴²

Before delving in to the response to the trial, it is instructive to look at the response to Slánský's arrest, which occurred a year before the trial itself. RFE had been forecasting Slánský's arrest for months before it actually occurred.Footnote ⁴³ Listeners to the radio station, one might suspect, would therefore not have been incredibly surprised by the news. The StB was charged with specifically investigating the response to Slánský's arrest, much as it would be tasked with following the reaction to the trial the following year. Their results indicate a broad range of responses.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some people, particularly those the StB identified as workers but not KSČ members, were indeed reported as saying they had expected Slánský's arrest because of what they had heard on RFE or Voice of America. Those identified by the StB as ‘reactionaries’ reportedly took pleasure in pointing out to party members Slánský's signature on their KSČ membership cards. Several remarked that perhaps this had solved the mystery of where RFE got its information, hypothesising that Slánský was the source. As might be expected, many party members were recorded simply saying that they accepted the decision. Quite a few seemed to regard it as really the affair of those ‘upstairs’ at party headquarters. Some older party members, however, reacted with surprise, disbelief or confusion, questioning whether someone who had been in the KSČ leadership for so long could really be a traitor and wondering what it would mean if this really was the case. Could it mean that Gottwald was also involved, despite the party's assurances to the contrary? One, identified as Josef Lhoták, a worker and member of KSČ, reportedly said ‘After the arrest of Slánský, now I don't know who I should believe!’Footnote ⁴⁵ The StB reports also make it clear that quite a number of people said that Slánský's arrest was unsurprising due to his Jewish origins.Footnote ⁴⁶ In a typical example, the report from Liberec quoted František Bažant, a doorkeeper and KSČ member, saying ‘I didn't believe in him for a long time, because he is a Jew. Jews are not to be trusted at all.’Footnote ⁴⁷

For most of the people observed, Slánský's arrest seemed plausible and acceptable, but for a wide array of reasons, not all of which would have pleased those in power. Some accepted the news because it had been forecast on RFE and other foreign radio stations, which gave them a believable framework for interpreting it. Some KSČ members obediently said it was impossible for the Central Committee to be mistaken about such things. Other party members simply shook their heads and said it was a matter for those ‘upstairs’, indicating that this was not an issue they particularly cared about. A few, though, reportedly remarked openly that the arrest did not meet their impression of Slánský and that it shook their faith in the party.Footnote ⁴⁸ And some, both in the party and outside it, found that Slánský's arrest rang true because it resonated with their attitudes about Jews and a supposed Jewish predilection for treason and conspiracy.

The reactions the StB recorded during the course of the trial were similarly mixed. Some of those observed responded along the lines that RFE would have hoped. These people expressed doubts about the testimony and suggested that the accused had been drugged to induce them to confess and stay on script.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such comments were most often reported from people labelled ‘reactionaries’, but sometimes came from other groups, including workers and KSČ members. One typical example noted, ‘some employees of the district court in Karlovo náměstí’ (in Prague) were whispering that the accused must have been given injections of some kind. Anyone else on trial, they said, ‘shows uncertainty, stammers, denies [things], etc., whereas these criminals speak as if they were at a lectern’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Another report from the Prague regional StB office mentioned the Hotel Paris. The ‘bourgeois’ clientele who came into the hotel during the trial supposedly said, ‘People, listen, this court is a complete charade, the accused are answering as if they are reciting for the class. It isn't possible that they are confessing so voluntarily.’Footnote ⁵¹ Some people were recorded specifically saying that they had listened to foreign radio coverage of the trial. One Josef Kočí, for example, a medical student and former adherent of the People's Party, mentioned listening to an interview with British MP Konni Zilliacus, who vehemently denied the statements made about him in the trial (that he had received intelligence directly from Slánský).Footnote ⁵² Such reactions were more commonly mentioned in StB reports, but also show up in the information bulletins prepared for a small circle of high-level KSČ officials.Footnote ⁵³

But while it is clear that some people observed considered the trial to be a charade, most Czechoslovaks acted in ways that legitimised the regime's version of the trial in one way or another. Indeed, it is likely that some of the same people who were overheard criticising the trial for being staged also acted in ways that contradicted those doubts. Both StB reports and documents from regional and national party officials emphasise the large numbers of people who claimed to take the testimony at face value, whether or not this reflected their ‘real’ beliefs. They articulated their acceptance of the trial scenario at KSČ local cell meetings and signed the thousands of workplace resolutions and individual letters that poured into party offices, demanding the deaths of the traitors.Footnote ⁵⁴ This reaction was also manifested in the countless calls to search for more traitors and numerous denunciations of supposed Slánský accomplices that were recorded by the StB, voiced at KSČ meetings or sent via letter to KSČ officials.Footnote ⁵⁵ Family members of the accused later recalled how they were shunned by their co-workers, neighbours and friends; even those who did act sympathetically towards them generally refused to do so publicly.Footnote ⁵⁶ These kinds of reactions were quite rational. People may have signed resolutions or called for extra vigilance or branded others as possible spies for a host of reasons: they may have been actively afraid of more plots and conspiracies to overthrow the regime, they may have thought this would divert suspicion from themselves, or they may have simply wanted to appear to be a good citizen. Whatever the reason, to commit such an act was publicly to accept the trial's validity. To ‘accept’ the trial as true did not necessarily mean that a person ‘believed’ the testimony reflected actual events. But it did mean they were willing to act as if they did. In this way, responses to the trial transcended the simple categories of truth and falsity. When they demanded a search for more traitors, people effectively acknowledged that the charges against Slánský and his supposed associates had some basis, no matter what their thoughts on the trial's accuracy were.

But while many of the different reactions people had to the trial indicated that, according to this definition, they ‘accepted’ its basic premise on some level, this did not mean that their reactions were welcomed by the Czechoslovak communist regime. Some openly used the trial as a way of expressing resentments towards the KSČ. Many workers and KSČ members in particular were recorded saying they were angry and appalled that such a massive conspiracy had existed within the party for so long. They wondered how the top brass of the party, including Gottwald, could not have known what was going on right under their noses. They had to be either incompetent or traitors themselves. How could the workers trust the leadership if this was the case?Footnote ⁵⁷ Reports from workplace KSČ meetings in Prague are full of confusion, anger and resentment. Comrades in Prague 2 wondered how the Central Committee could have allowed Slánský to recommend Gottwald's personal physician, while party members in Prague 4 demanded a complete reorganisation of the Central Committee and suggested that Gottwald himself perform self-criticism.Footnote ⁵⁸ Functionaries at Auto-Praga railed against the luxurious lifestyles of upper-level party officials and declared that Central Committee members should be open to criticism, despite doctrines of democratic centralism.Footnote ⁵⁹ Others were furious that Central Committee members had allowed enormous economic sabotage to go on right under their noses while the workers had been working themselves to the bone to make their quotas.Footnote ⁶⁰ These are just a few examples of many recorded instances of disgust and disillusionment in the wake of the trial. Such reactions were predicated on accepting the Slánský conspiracy as real, not staged.Footnote ⁶¹ But they also show that people who in some instances took the events presented in the trial as the truth did not simply parrot the prosecutors or the newspapers. Trial planners had hoped the testimony would ultimately inspire more faith in the KSČ leadership, but they could not control the emotional responses of listeners. When they heard about the extensive damage that the fiendish Slánský band had supposedly caused to their country, many felt that the trial had made their leaders look weak rather than heroic.

Reactions such as denouncing others or criticising party bigwigs were ways of (even unconsciously) using the trial to achieve a personal benefit of some kind. But not all responses to the Slánský trial had an apparent rational basis. The most resonant aspect of the trial was its anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitic comments were the most widely reported response to the trial; their number is overwhelming.Footnote ⁶² RFE's Czechoslovak desk had portrayed anti-Semitism in post-war Czechoslovakia as something that emanated from the Communist Party and, ultimately, from the Soviet Union. For RFE, anti-Semitic responses to the Slánský affair were the result of communist propaganda or communist pressure. Some KSČ officials, particularly Václav Kopecký, were indeed well known for their anti-Semitic outbursts.Footnote ⁶³ Yet, given the history of anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia, particularly from 1938 to 1948, it is impossible to view anti-Semitic responses to the Slánský trial as simply the result of communist propaganda.Footnote ⁶⁴ Anti-Semitic reactions to the trial were often not phrased in terms of Zionist imperialism, but in ways that echoed anti-Jewish discourses of earlier eras. For example, one StB report quoted one Oldřich Plachý, a retired KSČ member from the Liberec region, who said, ‘A person's reason stops when listening to the main proceedings, but with Slánský anything is possible, because he's a Jew. I spent some years in Slovakia where I had the chance to recognise the behaviour of Jews who wormed their way into the party and distorted the correct political line’.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Plachý, the incredible charges raised in the trial became much more plausible if one considered that the culprits were Jews, who were by nature devious and untrustworthy. Plachý's comments were echoed by many others, who also felt that the trial confirmed what they already knew about Jews. In another telling example, a report from the regional Prague StB office reported that Roman Catholic priests were saying that while it could not be true that Slánský and his band worked for the Americans, they could believe that they had been Israeli agents who wanted to take over the Czechoslovak Republic and ‘create a Jewish order here, as it was said they had in the Soviet Union, where Jews rule’.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Slánský to work for the Americans did not fit their preconceptions, but these priests could readily envision Jews as traitors to the Czechoslovak nation, just as they imagined that Jews dominated communist parties and had the real power in communist governments. Similarly, employees of the Hotel Paris who openly expressed their doubts about the trial also used the occasion to give vent to anti-Semitic feelings. Staff members mentioned that Geminder (one of the defendants) had been to the hotel frequently to visit a Jewish family who ‘lolled about and ate’ there for months, with the bill paid by the KSČ Central Committee. ‘We are working ourselves to the bone and the Jews have it good here!’ they griped.Footnote ⁶⁷

Anti-Semitic comments, as the above paragraph implies, were recorded throughout all segments of the population, regardless of class or political affiliation. The StB noted that in its perusal of domestic mail, a majority of the 6,776 letters it opened between 20 November and 24 November 1952 contained anti-Jewish sentiments.Footnote ⁶⁸ Both StB agents and KSČ party instructors frequently included overheard anti-Semitic remarks in their reports, some of them quite violent. To give just a few typical examples: party-instructor reports from the Spolana factory in Neratovice quoted one worker (Mrs Hruška, without party affiliation) saying ‘All Jews should be hung’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Two men identified as ‘former fascists’ were overheard by the StB saying ‘Send all the Jews to Jachymov [the uranium mines]’ and ‘Hitler [only] slaughtered a few of them. Příkopy was and still is a nest of Jews (židarna)’ (Příkopy, a Prague street, was the heart of German-speaking Prague between the wars and commonly identified with Prague Jews).Footnote ⁷⁰ A worker similarly put things in terms that echoed the Czech–German conflict of the pre-1945 era and gloated that maybe finally now he could speak Czech rather than German on Příkopy.Footnote ⁷¹ Some StB reports claimed that those outside the KSČ were more vicious in their anti-Semitism, tending to look approvingly back to Hitler's genocidal policies.Footnote ⁷² There is no compelling evidence to back up this assertion, which may simply have come from the authors’ own identification of ‘reactionaries’ with ‘former fascists’. What is clear, however, is that a substantial number of both KSČ members and their non-communist compatriots reacted to the trial by giving vent to anti-Semitic feelings. Whether the trial reflected actual events might be immaterial, because it intersected with what some considered deeper and more real truths about the nature of Jews.Footnote ⁷³

Although RFE was urging its listeners to reject so-called ‘Red anti-Semitism’, there is little in the archives to suggest that RFE listeners in particular or anti-communists in general took any stand against anti-Jewish comments.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to archival sources, hesitation over the outpouring of anti-Semitism surrounding the trial came more commonly from party members who took the ostensible divide between Zionism and anti-Semitism seriously. While many KSČ members, including some at the party's highest levels, were quite comfortable equating ‘Zionists’ with Jews and condemning both equally, a minority did resist this interpretation. Zionism might be pernicious, they reasoned, but anti-Semitism was a form of racism and should be shunned by good communists. For example, a report from party instructors in the Prague region noted that anti-Semitism was sweeping through Prague factories in the wake of the trial. They explained this as the work of ‘enemy elements’, who, they said, wanted to play on the feelings of less mature comrades.Footnote ⁷⁵ The same sentiment worked its way into the information bulletins prepared for top party leaders. The bulletin of 28 November 1952 warned that ‘opposition to Jews is incessantly getting stronger and incorrect opinions on the Jewish Question are spreading’. The author noted that it was not enough to answer comrades’ questions on the issue and called for specific commentary on the matter in Rudé Právo, the Communist Party daily.Footnote ⁷⁶

Some local party functionaries were confused and frustrated by the mixed messages coming from their leaders. Vladislav Hanák, the director of a national school and member of the party since 1945, was one such frustrated functionary. Hanák was a political instructor for the local party cell at the Jesenické sawmill. He wrote a letter to the party's Central Committee about his experience trying to discuss the lessons of the trial with his group, which was reprinted in the Information Bulletin of 12 December 1952. Hanák was dismayed that the sawmill workers expressed what he called ‘anti-Semitic and racist’ attitudes. He reportedly tried to explain to them that the party did not condemn Jews as a race, only if they were Zionists or class enemies. A working-class Jew, he told them, could be a good communist. But his students denied that such good Jews could exist. ‘Have you ever seen a Jew who does manual labour?’ they asked. Hanák was flummoxed by their response and forced to admit there were not any Jewish workers in his district. He wrote to the Central Committee to request help in promulgating what he took to be the real party line. ‘It is necessary to correct anti-Semitism and explain it in the press’, he said.Footnote ⁷⁷

Admittedly, it was a fine line between condemning anti-Semitism as racist and encouraging the persecution of ‘Zionists’ and Jewish bourgeois reactionaries. The Jesenecké sawmill workers thought that it was a simple fact that all Jews were wealthy capitalists, which would rightly put them under suspicion. Similarly, a report about the response to the trial in a savings bank on Wenceslas Square in Prague noted that both KSČ members and other employees just did not trust Jews because ‘It is a world Jewish conspiracy, they want to get into the communist parties of all countries’. The report then clarified that this distrust of Jews was not racist, but stemmed from (presumably valid) fears of class enemies.Footnote ⁷⁸