Stalin’s show processes – of loyalty and betrayal, euphoria and horror

A book – a risk. And this was successful. Although it is warned here in advance to use a perfidious western intelligence operation to make up your own sins.

Hartmut König wrote a novel. Even if the songwriter calls his book a documentary fiction. He picks up real historical events that did wounds and left scars – in the movement that started in 1917 with promises, met millions around the globe with hopes that she freed from oppression, looting, robbery, disenfranchisement and enslavement. Encouraged by a role model that ultimately disappointed: the real -practiced socialism on a sixth of the earth.

No, Hartmut König does not want to compete with Franz Kafka (“The Process”) or George Orwell (“1984”). He is not “only” concerned with charges, he is looking for explanations. Fares deeper and knows more as a younger contemporary than the German-Czech writer, who died early in 1924, had to experience the Briton in Spain in the ranks of international fighters against the fascist putschists around Franco. Hartmut König, born in 1947, knows about the enormous show processes in the Soviet Union in the 1930s as well as at the end of the 1940s/early 1950s in Eastern Europe, about structures, mechanisms and people. Not out of their own experience, but due to the stories of the archives, which had been silent after decades, their silence, victims such as perpetrators and thanks to scientific research in the early 1990s.

The journalist studied journalist (who, incidentally, had completed a traineeship at the “New Germany”), co-founder of the legendary October Club, a once popular FDJ singing group, and in the last year of the GDR Deputy Minister of Culture, his Polittriller, but not only about the anti-Semotic tribunal against Rudolf Slánský and comrades in Prague, but also The other show processes against top communist officials in the immediate post -war period. Those three years earlier in Budapest against László Rajk, also a former Spanish fighter, as well as the former commander of a partisan unit in Sofia against Trajtscho Kostow. Fortunately, the process against Władysław Gomułka planned in Warsaw did not come about, but the Polish communist who had fought against Nazi Occupation was also arrested and excluded from the party. In Tirana, the founder of the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania elver hoxha rigoros eliminated supposed rivals. Everything ran according to the same pattern and mainly carried the handwriting of the NKVD boss Lawrentij Berija. Hartmut König also sees other strings. But from the beginning.

In the 1970s, the author was editor -in -chief of the “World Students News” published in Prague from the International Student Association. “Even if you lived behind the Iron Curtain, you weren’t stupid, not blind, not totally ignorant.” On a January day of 1974, when the “Rudé Právo”, central organ of the KP of Czechoslovakia, had reported the death of the Kpč official, who died out, the young German wanted to be in a locally on the small side of Prague Enjoy “Staropramen” when an elderly gentleman got involved in a conversation:

The Josef wouldn’t deserve that. »To be thrown into the grave so unworthy. As if he hadn’t been the leader of the communist illegal. A hero during the Nazi occupation and a great hope for it. But betrayed by Stalin and his Prague adept. Arrested, wrongly convicted. After Stalin’s death, free of charge without return in public honor. Only climbed up at Dubček and fell with him again. ”So the old Czech spoke to the student official from the neighboring country GDR and drawn him attention to the opposite building, in which Slánský and comrades were sentenced to death or prison terms due to absurd accusations. The tragedy of the Reds at the Moldau ruffles his heart, the old man said.

Half a Saeculum later, Hartmut König remembers the episode and wants to educate the fate of Josef Smrkovský and his fellow sufferer, kneels into historical matter and encounters not only mistrust and denunciation within the international communist movement, but also a targeted disinformation campaign of western services in 1948, which was started from the CIA in 1948 »Splinter Factor «. “The operation led to a spiral of paranoia and repression and culminated in large -scale show processes in the socialist camp.” This is the material from which Hartmut König weaves its history from “historical facts and literary imagination”.

The tragic fate of Oskar Chesilsksi, an invented figure, is to be informed, whose curriculum vitae can be considered representative of communist officials in Eastern and Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The documentary fiction begins with a long letter, whose grandson one day in November 1990 receives from the Philippines and with which someone apparently wants to make his heart easier on the retirement. The 90-year-old sender named Pavel Novák reveals himself as a colleague of Oskar Chesilsksi in British emigration when Nazi Germany had Europe in the strangle. Worked for the US Office for Strategic Services (OSS), in the fight against Hitler fascism, had been worked within the United Allied Coalition. Chesilsksi immediately returned to Czechoslovakia after the liberation and took on high functions in the KPč, but was then arrested, sentenced to death and executed. The letter writer opens up to the grandson: »However, his fate has not given me peace since then. For me, it had always stated that the publicly raised accusations against Oskar lacked any factual basis. Then connections to a war comrade of the OSS showed me a trace of his death. Her Mr. Grandfather fell victim to a perfidious post -war conspiracy. ”Some helpers are still alive.

The grandson, who grew up in the GDR, a fan of Che Guevara, which is why he also likes to call himself che, and Juri Gagarin, the first person in space, is electrified. To become curious, he flies to Manila, wants to know what happened, who has defamed his grandfather and why.

As a result, the involved in the Causa Oskar Chesilsksi alternately have their say, more or less honestly report on their share of his sad lot. The responsible prosecutor does not let go of the nightmares: »The eternal flashlights on the undilant guilt. The arrests. The torture nights. The blackmailed confessions. The shameful judgments. The hasty executions. ”Karel Soubek confesses that he had become a murderer. And justifies: »But what should I do back then? I was in the wrong function in the bad years. Everywhere in the party, panicked fear of traitors rampant. The folk democracies defended the part of the world won. The opposite powers rely on erosion in their innermost. To do this, they needed their quislings and bribes … enemies with a party book had to be cut out of society, such as cancer ulcers from human bodies. And first at the top. “

The Soviet intelligence officer and military carnival carpet nicov from the same wood: »At that time there was no doubt. Everything happened in the service. Also the exposure of the Zionist agent Chesilski. His liquidation was a warning to all cosmopolitans that had sneaked into our ranks. «His American counterpart Robert Snyder, who had participated in D-Day, who had participated in the landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and later worked as a double agent for CIA and KGB, was more thoughtful, but had a no less fat role in the affair. However, the statement by Mark Ashley, who wanted Oskar Chesilski in 1949 as an informant for the CIA, wanted to be more serious. A fist -thick lie: “He was personally ready for this step because of insurely political differences with the leadership of the KPTSC and Klement Gottwald.”

On the other hand, Ari Blum, who had flown from Prague with Oskar Chesilski in front of the Wehrmacht and was sent to Eastern Europe after the war by David Ben-Gurion: »We were looking for allies. The British had lanked us … The Soviet Union had quickly recognized us and gave the Czech order to deliver weapons. Nothing was to be expected from the English and Americans. ”The weapon deal was threaded as quietly as possible. With the former comrade Chesilski as a negotiator of the Czechs. But then the wind turned, says Ari Blum. “Suddenly Stalin made the front against the Jews at the head of the Czechoslovak CP.” Anyone who had contact with a certain Noel H. Field during the war head of the Unstarian Service Committee (USC), an American aid organization that helped Jews to flee the German anti-Semites, was now considered a henchman of the imperialist world Judaism. Ari Blum is arrested, should say against Chesilski: »All snake words, so first and falted as it is crossed. If I claimed in the interrogations that I had negotiated with the Soviet Plazet at any time, I was shouted down … “He was ashamed to have given up his resistance:” But even the accused made confessions, the absurdity of which was as clear to me as the interrogation specialists. First the bones, then the honor – that was mostly the order. ”Ultimately, Ari Blum is also shot, in Tel Aviv.

Incredible how many people are involved in the conspiracy. And how many were senselessly died or broken forever. Of course there is also a love story. “The night with the little Chesilski was nice,” says Irkat, whose father was also victims of Stalin’s delusion of persecution and who is still a believing communist. In her monologue, among other things, the so -called “medical conspiracy”, Stalin’s last major crime, is addressed. And the receding speech by Nikita Khrushchev on the XX. Party congress of the KPDSU 1956. Above all, the “Splinter Factor” operation as one of the most perfidious spy coups in the CIA: “A shame how all Dulles threaded the fatal frame-up for the agency. How he turned the harmless left-wing philanthropes of Noel Field into a clever agent advertiser who allegedly drove home to American pointed services from the west-Exil. And how to have a defector from the Polish secret service called Józef światło whisper this lie in Stalin’s ear, which meant death and prison for so many communists associated with Field. «

The end of the polytric thriller is surprising. The story is truly tire of stage, with Shakespearescher spice. “Where love and loyalty, also betrayal, where there is also disappointment, where euphoria also horror, where illusion also disillusion.”

Hartmut König: Stalin, Dulles and the gallows in Prague. Documentary fiction. The new Berlin, 128 pages, Br., 14 €.