Each week, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is "Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954" by George H. Hodos. Published in 1987, the book offers a comparative political history of the Stalinist purges in seven Eastern European “people’s democracies” from 1948, the year of the Stalin-Tito split, to 1954, the year after Stalin’s death.

Hodos's overall thesis is that the show trials were instruments of political discipline imposed by Moscow on its newly created satellite-states, designed to eliminate local autonomy, destroy potentially independent elites and enforce ideological conformity through terror.

Hodos was personally caught up in the post-1948 political repression. Born in 1921 in Hungary, he emigrated in 1939 to Switzerland, studied at the University of Zurich and joined the Communist Party. After World War II, he returned to Hungary, where he worked as an editor of economic journals and as a correspondent for Western newspapers. In 1949, Hodos was arrested and convicted as an alleged “American spy.” Like many others, he was rehabilitated in the aftermath of Stalin’s death, and he remained in Hungary until the 1956 uprising. Following its suppression, he emigrated — first to Austria, then to the United States.

The book is organized into chapters, each devoted to a different country. The most detailed chapter, understandably, covers Hungary and the trial of prominent Communist László Rajk. Hodos details the political rivalry between László Rajk and Communist Party chief Mátyás Rákosi. He also discusses the infiltration of the Hungarian secret police by Soviet advisers, Rajk’s forced confession, the dramatic public trial and the subsequent mass arrests of alleged conspirators.

Other chapters cover Bulgaria and the trial of Traicho Kostov, and Czecholslovakia and the trial of Rudolf Slansky.

It is to Hodos's credit that he doesn't offer a simple-minded tale of good and evil, of bad Communists and good Westerners. As he points out, the Stalinist purges in Eastern Europe were not primarily about punishing ideological deviation per se. Nor were they simply expressions of “Moscow’s paranoia” in the abstract. The purges must be understood in the context of growing international tension and the very real threat of war between the Communist world and the U.S.-led West.

The Soviet fear of war with the West was very real, and the Soviet sense of vulnerability should not be underestimated. The Soviet attempt at creating a series of buffer states in Eastern Europe in anticipation of another possible 1941-style attack was floundering.

The Soviet-imposed Communist governments lacked popular support and appeared destined to collapse. To a Soviet Union that had barely started to recover from a devastating war, the loss of potential geopolitical allies to its Anglo-American ideological adversaries would pose a serious threat to its security, not to mention its ideological cohesion.

The show trials were attempts to pre-empt possible betrayal under extreme geopolitical pressure, not merely theatrical exercises in terror. Hodos emphasizes that in 1945–48, the countries of Eastern Europe were not fully controlled by the local Communist parties. Rather, they were unstable, politically volatile, rife with armed underground groups, penetrated by Western intelligence, culturally Western-leaning and under the sway of elites who were not Communists.

Hodos argues that the Kremlin believed that the Western was preparing for war against the Soviet Union. As the Kremlin saw it, the CIA was infiltrating émigré groups, Catholic clergy and Social Democratic parties and was developing ties with local Communists, particularly with those who had spent time abroad.

As Hodos points out, the Kremlin’s suspicions were not wholly baseless. U.S. and British intelligence were running operations out of Austria, Germany and Italy. The British were running an insurgency operation in Albania. The Vatican was running anti-Communist networks in Poland, Hungary and Croatia.

Hodos does not claim that the defendants in the trials were actual CIA agents. But he stresses that the fear of CIA penetration was real, pervasive and intensifying in Moscow and the satellite capitals.

The Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe were pre-emptive purges designed to eliminate figures who might defect, collaborate with the West or act as conduits for Western intelligence in the event of war. Stalin needed reliable cadres in Eastern Europe, cadres who could be relied upon to remain loyal to Moscow. Communists who had lived abroad and had developed extensive connections with Western intelligence services during World War II appeared unreliable.

The purges thus were not the product of random paranoia on the part of an aging dictator in Moscow, but a systematic attempt to remove Communists who might defect to the West under pressure.

George H. Hodos’s “Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948–1954” is a book worth reading because the author gets away from familiar cliches and attempts to understand a painful period of Eastern and Central European history in the context of its time.