Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The last Stalinist show trial

Sixty years ago this week, on November 20, 1952, the last of the Stalinist show trials, that against the "Trotskyit, Titoist, Zionist" agents Rudolf Slansky and cohorts, opened in Prague. It lasted several days and at the end eleven of the fourteen accused were condemned to death. They were executed on December 3 and their ashes thrown out of a car onto an icy road because the people in charge could not be bothered to carry them to the appointed destination. Three months later Stalin died and much of the Communist world changed.

On another blog I have written a long piece about the Stalinist purges and trials of post-Second World War Eastern Europe. I can't say enjoy it but I hope people will read it and find it interesting. It is not possible to understand developments in Eastern Europe without knowing something about those events.

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