Report on the Murder of the General Secretary FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
After Stalin's anti-Yugoslav campaign against Tito failed, Moscow focused on Czechoslovakia as the weakest link in the Soviet postwar front. In 1952, a show trial ended with the hangings of 11 Czech Communist Party officials, including general-secretary Rudolph Slansky; all of the convicted had been falsely accused of treason, espionage or sabotage. Working from archival documents, Czech historian Kaplan, who emigrated to the West in the 1970s, presents a chilling, painstaking account of Stalin's ruthless charade and of Czech president Klement Gottwald's complicity in the judicial murders. We are shown that anti-Semitism partially motivated the trial, and that the courtroom proceedings were staged from confessions obtained under torture to dress rehearsals of prosecutors and ``witnesses'' and even coaching of the alleged victims. Photos. (Jan.)
Library Journal
This account of the 1950s Moscow-orchestrated blood purge of the Czech Communist party is based on archival materials to which the author had access as a party historian. It rivals Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge ( LJ 6/1/88) in its absorbing depiction of Stalinist terror within a Communist elite. While aimed at Soviet and Eastern European specialists, Kaplan's study is as gripping as an Orwell novel, except here the main victims, including Czech General Secretary Rudolf Slansky, helped to establish the police state by which they were eventually destroyed. All larger libraries should welcome this contribution to scholarship on postwar Soviet foreign policy.-- Robert Decker, Harriman Inst., Columbia
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