The Modern Inquisition. Hugo Dewar 1953
‘Do you plead guilty?’ ‘Yes, I plead guilty.’ One day after the other the defendants reply: Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty... But disturbing the harmony of this carefully conducted orchestra is the persistent echo of a false note. The chief accused has failed to support the rest of the performers. He has pleaded not guilty, and has refused to be shaken from that plea.
‘Citizen Judges! I plead guilty of having had an incorrect attitude towards the Soviet Union...’, begins the defendant. To the uninitiated this appears a quite satisfactory opening. But already the president and the prosecutor have an uneasy feeling that this is a departure from the prepared script. And as the accused continues the uneasiness increases, is communicated to the entire stage management personnel and to the remainder of the accused.
... expressed in the method of bargaining, adopted in our trade with the Soviet Union, in withholding certain prices in transactions with the capitalist countries, and also in my order concerning the application of the Law for Safeguarding of State Secrets and in my liberal attitude regarding anti-Soviet statements, made in my presence. All this created an attitude of insincerity and mistrust toward the Soviet Union and placed in difficult situation the Soviet representatives who went to different of our government offices, for information, which prior to that time, before the Law on State Secrets was enacted, they had freely received. This attitude towards the Soviet Union is the less excusable for me because I was aware of the colossal role of the Soviet Union in safeguarding the liberty and independence of our country, in building its economy on the basis of Socialism. I was aware that without the Soviet Union there is no free democratic Bulgaria; without the Soviet Union... [and so on]. I also plead guilty of my attempt at the Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, to place the Central Committee in opposition to the Politbureau, whereby I committed a flagrant factional act... My attitude about the Sixteenth Plenum was also incorrect, and after it, that towards the leader of the party and of the Bulgarian people — Dimitrov, whom I criticised sharply and without impartiality, and even allowed myself personal attacks on him...
The president has heard enough. The accused is deliberately avoiding the nub of the matter. The president puts a question designed to remind him of it. ‘I am proceeding to that’, replies the accused. And then the bombshell. ‘I do not plead guilty to having capitulated before the fascist police, nor to having been recruited for service in the British intelligence, nor to conspiratorial activities with Tito and his clique.’ (The Trial of Traicho Kostov and His Group (Sofia, 1949), pp 66-68)
These words are like a sudden electric shock running through all present. The whole atmosphere of the court abruptly changes; all eyes and all minds focus on the lonely figure of the accused who has had the incredible daring to cry — ‘Not guilty!’ Currents of hardly suppressed anger strike at him from the court officials, and the nervous anxiety of his co-accused is replaced by a bitter resentment at his unreasoning, hopeless folly, which threatens to undo them all. The court listens in tense silence to the exchange that follows.
President: ‘I am referring to your action after 29 April 1942. You heard it this morning and you have read it in the indictment.’ [This refers to his alleged recruitment as a police spy — author.]
Kostov: ‘If you will allow me, I wish to say a few words on my left-sectarian past, referred to in the indictment.’
President: ‘Your left-sectarian past does not date back to 29 April 1942, it is an earlier phenomenon.’
Kostov: ‘Exactly.’
President: ‘We say of 29 April 1942. According to the indictment you are accused of the collapse of the Central Committee.’
Kostov: ‘As the collapse of the Central Committee is connected with the influence of my left-sectarian past, I beg to be allowed to dwell on this question in a few words.’
President: ‘We shall go too far if we start explaining the nature of left-sectarianism; what is known of left-sectarianism is sufficient for the court. What have you to say under these concrete circumstances?’
Kostov: ‘I have no intention of explaining the whole question of left-sectarianism. I wish to make clear only the question of my participation in it... for I am treated in the indictment as an active participator in the left-sectarian faction.’
But the president is not going to allow us to peep into the esoteric mysteries of ‘left-sectarianism’. The situation is already bad enough, without risking an exposure of what ‘left-sectarianism’ really was and who really participated in it. Who could tell — the world might learn something new about the 1923 explosion in Sofia Cathedral. Better to keep to ‘concrete circumstances’. So the next question is:
President: ‘Do you confirm the deposition given by you in the inquiry and in your answer in which you refer to it?’
Kostov: ‘I do not confirm that deposition.’
The prosecutor takes over: ‘Were you tortured when you were detained in 1942?’
Kostov: ‘I beg your pardon? I did not catch that.’
Prosecutor: ‘Did you undergo an inquisition in the prison in 1942?’
Kostov: ‘I did.’
Prosecutor: ‘In spite of that you did not give any evidence as to your guilt?’
Kostov: ‘No.’
The prosecutor and the president then ask a series of questions aimed solely at establishing the fact that Kostov had met certain representatives of the West and other suspicious persons, including the Yugoslav Kardelj [1] and the famous — or infamous — Hungarian Communist Béla Kun (who vanished in the great Russian purge). But Kostov succeeds in also bringing in the names of other Communists with whom he had contact — Thorez, the French leader; Togliatti, the Italian; Ana Pauker of Rumania — all of them then persona grata with the Kremlin.
As hard as they try, neither the prosecutor nor the president can shake Kostov in his denial of the main charge against him, without which the rest of the charges amount to no more than that he had political disagreements in the distant past with other Bulgarian party leaders.
And here, perhaps better than in any other case, Stalin’s attitude towards political criticism within his parties is laid bare. In the final analysis the much-vaunted freedom of criticism ('criticism and self-criticism’) amounts only to the right to admit one’s errors and glorify the infallibility of the Leader. It may be used as a partial check on bureaucratic excesses, but its major purpose is to maintain uniformity of thinking. Tactical errors can be labelled ‘left-sectarian’, ‘right-opportunism’, ‘ultra-leftism’, ‘centrism’, and so forth; and in all this the insidious influence of the ‘class enemy’ brought to the light of day. Criticism and self-criticism keep up to date the dossiers of all members, and prepare the too ambitious, those with insufficiently supple spines, for branding as enemy agents in case of need. Kostov’s refusal to play the game according to the rules took the sting out of the charges; unless he were shown up as a police spy the case against him amounted to no more than that he had attempted to act in his relations with Soviet trade delegates as the representative of a sovereign, independent state. This would not do at all. Yet the more Kostov was questioned the greater the danger of stripping the veil of hypocrisy from the government’s case. His examination was therefore stopped. Instead of questioning him further, or allowing him to ‘explain’, the court proceeded to read the confession made by him under preliminary questioning. This forced deposition was eagerly ‘confirmed’ by all the other accused. The value of such ‘confirmation’ can be seen from the testimony of the accused Boris Khristov, formerly Bulgarian Commercial Counsellor in Moscow:
Then Traicho Kostov told me that my mission in Moscow was to be double-sided: official and unofficial. This communication of the First Secretary of the Central Committee surprised me very much... My confusion grew... Traicho Kostov began to talk about the international political situation... He stressed that... it was necessary for our country to keep to the course of an independent policy, that is, to begin the course of a gradual but certain detachment from the influence of the Soviet Union... I was extremely surprised... He noticed my confusion and hastened to tell me that ... he knew of certain awkward moments in my past... I gathered all my strength and told him that I did not understand to which awkward moments of my past he was referring. Then he told me clearly and openly, that I had been an agent provocateur and that I had rendered services to the fascist police. I was shocked at this communication. I was frightfully confused, frightened, astounded and upset. (Ibid, pp 187-88)
After this conversation Khristov goes to Moscow, where his work in the trade negotiations is directly supervised by Georgi Dimitrov, the well-known Bulgarian leader whom Kostov is later to be accused of ‘personally criticising’, indeed a grave crime. ‘At this meeting with Dimitrov’ (27 December 1944), continues Khristov, ‘at which he finally approved the report prepared by me for the Soviet Minister of Trade, Mikoyan, he gave me detailed instructions in regard to the line which I should follow in my contact with the Soviet representatives.’ Dimitrov speaks to him of Bulgaria’s difficult situation, of the help the Soviet Union can give her, of the need for the closest and friendliest relations, and so forth. Now was the time for Khristov to make a clean breast of his agreement with Kostov to sabotage the negotiations:
I listened to the wise words of Dimitrov, I saw and felt that this was the only correct way, that this was advice which corresponded to the real interests of our country. But even then, before the great son of the Bulgarian working class, before Georgi Dimitrov, I was not strong enough to reveal the secret intentions and instructions of Traicho Kostov... If I had done this at that time, I would have contributed much to the party, I would have freed myself too from the obligation I had taken before Traicho Kostov. My safety at that moment was assured. I was far from Traicho Kostov. I was in the Soviet Union, I was near Georgi Dimitrov. But I proved weak. I proved very weak. So I continued to travel along this criminal road. (Ibid, p 189, author’s emphasis)
From this it appears that the only reason Khristov could think of for not seizing the opportunity of denouncing Kostov and assuring his own safety was that he was ‘weak’. This is the only reason he can think of. But there was another, far more convincing reason. It was simply that Dimitrov would not have believed such an accusation against Kostov, at least not without more proof than Khristov’s mere assertion. But how could Khristov have told the court that, without calling everyone’s attention to the fact that the court itself was accepting his mere assertion as proof of Kostov’s guilt?
There is another aspect of these trade negotiations that throws doubt on Khristov’s testimony. This is the fact that although Dimitrov was in Moscow directly supervising the negotiations, they dragged on for nearly two and a half months (p 190): ‘The negotiations went on slowly and with difficulties, which we created and thought out daily.’ The agreement was not signed until 14 March 1945. What happened to Dimitrov’s great authority during all this time? ‘Dimitrov intervened’, but it was obviously a tardy intervention. And, moreover, nothing in the conduct of the Bulgarian negotiators had aroused any suspicions on his part. For the same representatives are present for the next negotiations in March 1946, with renewed and even more urgent instructions from Kostov to ‘sabotage’. Yet the second agreement was reached in less time than the first. On these second negotiations Khristov testified that ‘the two main questions on which the principal struggle was to take place in these hostile underground activities of ours, were the question of the quantities of tobacco which Bulgaria was then to offer the Soviet Union, and that of prices in general’ (ibid, p 192). As a consequence of this ‘underground activity’ — that is, trying to get the best possible prices for Bulgarian goods — ‘negotiations proceeded with great difficulty’, and ‘at this moment Georgi Dimitrov intervened again'; with the result that ‘our hostile plans and intentions were defeated by Dimitrov’, and ‘a trade agreement was signed which, in 1946, was estimated as most favourable for our country’ (ibid p 193). Khristov also says ‘I have omitted to point out that at the end of the negotiations, at the most difficult moment, Minister Neikov had fallen ill’ and Kostov came to Moscow to take charge of the ‘sabotage’ operations (ibid, p 193 — author’s emphasis). In spite of this the agreement was signed very shortly after Kostov’s arrival. Does this not rather look as though Kostov went to Moscow to break the deadlock — and succeeded?
All that this testimony shows is (a) that the Bulgarians wanted to drive as hard a bargain as they could; (b) that Dimitrov was not exactly pressing with his ‘intervention'; and (c) that Kostov also wanted to get the best possible terms. The attitude they adopted rankled in the minds of the Russians, was recalled after the Yugoslav-Russian break, with the result that the responsible Bulgarian negotiators appeared to be just the right men for a confession trial. It is, of course, even possible that in the poisonous atmosphere of almost pathological suspicion engendered by Tito’s defection the Russians saw treachery where there was only the desire to serve the interests of the Bulgarian people. In any case, after the Kostov trial any future negotiators would tread very warily, wouldn’t they?
This, then, is the kind of evidence advanced by the other accused to prove Kostov’s treachery. There is nothing in any of it that could possibly connect Kostov with the ‘fascist police’ or British intelligence. Nor does Kostov’s past record suggest that he would have been at all likely to work with the police.
At the time of his trial he was fifty-two years of age. A hard-faced man with — even for a Stalinist functionary — a more than usually one-track mind, he was noted for his ascetic habits, and was widely believed to be one of the few who had not cracked under torture by the Bulgarian police when the Communist Party was illegal or semi-legal. He had spent the whole of his adult life in the service of Communism. His tough, unyielding moral fibre was sufficiently demonstrated in 1924 when, under interrogation by the police, he threw himself from a fourth-floor window, sustaining severe injuries and barely escaping with his life. He bore the marks of this and other like experiences on his body (so that at his trial his former comrades were able to taunt him on his misshapen back). He was portrayed by party propagandists as a hero of the resistance during the war years (see Orlin Vasiliev, Suprotivata; quoted by Hugh Seton-Watson in his The East European Revolution (Methuen, 1950), p 93). He owed his rise to second-in-command of the Bulgarian party to his long record of devoted and courageous service and an intelligence that raised him above the average level of leading party members. Prior to his arrest there had never been any question of his loyalty to Stalinism, his reputation could hardly have stood higher among party members and he was generally regarded as the natural successor to Dimitrov.
There was absolutely nothing unwarranted in this. It was only after his arrest that his party career was construed as the artful manoeuvring of an ‘enemy agent’. However, so many Stalinist leaders have come to be denounced and denigrated in this manner by their erstwhile admiring followers that we must either conclude that all Communist parties are powerfully influenced and even controlled by ‘agents of the class enemy’, or that the accusations against these people are false, and motivated by considerations of political expediency alone. We are asked to believe that in Russia itself the only man among the old Bolshevik leaders (with the exception of those who died before it became necessary to ‘unmask’ them) who was not a traitor was Stalin. And in those countries now forced within the Soviet orbit almost as black a picture of treachery is shown us.
There is an extremely nauseating flavour to these internecine quarrels within the Communist parties. One recoils in disgust from the dreary catalogue of improbable crimes recurring with monotonous sameness in trial after trial after trial; one is repelled by the spectacle of humbled creatures denouncing themselves and their fellow accused and the appropriate enemies of the regime in the same stereotyped jargon, each striving to outdo the other. The obscene blood-lust of the government’s gutter press and radio; the unashamed struggle for self-preservation at all costs; the utter lack of any human feelings towards old comrades; the despicable hypocrisy of the upstarts elbowing their way to the cushy jobs; the lying and intriguing, the cringing, the subservience; the adulation of dead leaders like Dimitrov, who now are ‘safe'; and above all the Byzantine flattery of ‘the father of the peoples’ — all this squirming corruption sickens the heart. With what relief, then, do we turn to Kostov, who — even if he could not bring himself to see and openly admit the rottenness of the methods he had himself used and the politics he had himself furthered — at least refused to accept the final degradation offered in return for his life. He compels admiration. The words of his defence counsel (save the mark!) make his situation clear:
His fate is in his own hands. If from his last words you feel and understand, not from the content, not from the words, but from the tone of his words, of his confession, from the tremulousness of his voice that a completely sincere repentance has taken place in him, that he is wholly admitting his guilt, if you feel that this repentance is not only a mask and dissimulation, but his internal essence, this fact, which he is able to bring you with the sincerity of his repentance, is such that the court would have to take, is bound to take, into consideration. Such was also the warning [sic] of the president. (Ibid, p 572)
Does it need to be spelled out?
The stages leading to Kostov’s ‘liquidation’ are worth recording, for they follow in telescoped fashion the classic method of the Moscow Trials.
On 26-27 March 1949, the Central Committee of the party passed a resolution in which ‘errors’ and ‘mistakes’ committed by Kostov are castigated in a relatively mild manner. On 4 April the official Bulgarian News Agency confirmed a report that he had been arrested, but on the 6th this was denied — he had only been removed from the Politbureau. On the 14th it was stated that he had been appointed Director of the National Library. On 27 May Kolarov, then Foreign Minister, explained that Kostov’s disgrace had been due to his mistrust of the USSR. Kolarov then warned all Bulgarian Communists to be on guard against every manifestation of anti-Sovietism, ‘the most heinous form of nationalist deviation’. Still nothing is said of his arrest. On 14 June Kostov’s expulsion from the party is announced, and at the same time it is stated that a report had been received from a Politbureau member, Mr Poptomov (later to become Minister of Foreign Affairs) on the ‘hostile and provocative activities of Tito’s clique against the Soviet Union, the People’s Democracy, and especially our country and the party’. The stage is being set, the props moved into position. On the 17th Kostov is deprived of his seat in the National Assembly — by a decision of the Communist Party Executive, on account of his ‘anti-Dimitrov and anti-Stalin activities’ (on 2 July it is announced that Dimitrov has died in the USSR). Only on 20 July was the world informed that Kostov had been arrested (on 25 June) on charges of economic sabotage, etc, etc. On 16 October the Yugoslav journal Borba predicted another treason trial in Sofia, with Kostov as star performer, but it was not until 30 November that this prediction was confirmed and the indictment against Kostov and ten others published. The trial opened on 7 December. Among the accused with Kostov were I Stefanov, ex-Minister of Finance, N Pavlov, former deputy Minister of Public Works, B Khristov, former Commercial Attaché in Moscow, B Panzov, former Counsellor at the Yugoslav Legation, and I Tutev, former Director of Foreign Trade. Following the first hint of Kostov’s fall from grace in the Central Committee resolution, we get the following political technique employed to prepare the atmosphere for his arrest and trial, and to prepare him for the preliminary interrogation that will take place in private.
After the relatively mild March resolution Kolarov presented a report to the Plenum of the Central Committee on 11-12 June. Since March, he told the comrades, ‘a number of new and very important elements in the anti-party activity of Kostov have been revealed'; there had been a general demand from party members for more stringent measures against him; it was evident that Kostov had become ‘a banner of international reaction’. Still it is mainly a question of his ‘mistakes’, although it is asserted that these mistakes caused great damage on the economic front and inflicted great harm to the reputation of the party, especially in the village. (The agricultural policy pursued by the government has led to widespread opposition in the villages; a temporary retreat is indicated, and also scapegoats required. This is another aspect of the trial in preparation.) The root of his error can be traced back to his ‘left-sectarianism’ years before the war, when he opposed any collaboration with the Agrarian Union and when he was on bad terms with the Dimitrov-Kolarov group within the party. ‘He attempted’, reports Kolarov, ‘by false information to mislead the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) and to make use of its authority for raising his own prestige at the expense and prestige of the Central Committee of our party.’ (In other words, Kostov, aware of the manoeuvres to undermine his position in the party, appealed to Moscow. This is the normal procedure in cases of inner-party conflict. Whoever receives the support of Moscow is assured of victory, whoever is rejected by Moscow is doomed. Note that there is never any question of initiating a party discussion, calling District and Area Conferences, and finally a National Conference of the rank and file. Everything is decided at the top by a select handful of the élite; the most that the rank and file is permitted here is to vote for resolutions handed down to them and ‘discussed’ at carefully rigged meetings.)
Kolarov’s report continued: ‘... he criticised comrade Dimitrov most sharply, more sharply than was justified by facts or was judicious, for infringement of the collective principle in the leadership of the party.’ That means Kostov was accused, rightly or wrongly, of suggesting that Dimitrov was imposing his personal leadership on the party, which, since everyone was aware that Dimitrov was only the mouthpiece of Stalin, was an indirect attack on Stalin. The charge — whether he made it or not — is turned round against him: it is Kostov who seeks to impose his personal dictatorship on the party. From this it is apparent that a battle over the question of the party leadership was in process. Kostov had attacked the March resolution on the grounds that it was based on a Politbureau report reflecting only the ‘personal opinion of individual members of the Politbureau’. It was alleged that he had in this way sought to divide the party and create a faction in his favour. Failing to secure the support of Moscow, he had finally admitted his errors at the March meeting of the Central Committee (when the resolution condemning him was passed). But in this stifling atmosphere of mutual distrust and desperate intrigue in the struggle for survival, the fact that Kostov had even tried to defend himself meant that he was finished. His complete surrender was required as an example and a warning to others, and as an assurance to Moscow that the Bulgarian party was its utterly submissive tool. Kostov’s last declaration of submission was therefore ‘as insincere as all his preceding declarations. Far from disarming ideologically and politically before the party he only submitted to the inevitable.’ He voted for the Politbureau resolution submitted to the Central Committee, but this was simply a fresh attempt to deceive the party.
Thus Kostov was hustled down the slimy path to a traitor’s grave. He had already been forced to make admissions of ‘errors’. These had to be worked up and embroidered to a full confession. The political technique for the manufacture of confessions by party members is shown in the following further quotation from Kolarov’s June report:
For his disarming ideologically and politically before the party, his formal declarations and verbal acknowledgments of errors and guilt are far from being sufficient. After he has held such high posts in the party and the government, he should have concretely set forth all the harm he has caused to the party and state by his erroneous nationalistic conceptions, by his non-Bolshevik methods in the leadership of the party and the government of the state, and by his fractionism [sic — MIA] ... I have in mind the exceptionally important and decisive post of President of the Commission for Economic and Financial questions... [author’s emphasis]
The political recantation on the part of a party member already constitutes a certain ‘softening up’, a step towards a full confession of guilt. Recantation is confession in embryo, and each new recantation moves ever nearer to the inevitable end. This was how the Moscow Trial accused were prepared, and prepared themselves, for the final ‘conditioning’ of the preliminary interrogation. The process is well explained in the following words of Leon Trotsky:
The political recantations on the part of Oppositionists date back to 1924, and especially at the end of 1927. If we collate the texts of these recantations on the basis of the leading Soviet press... we obtain a geometric procession, the end terms of which are the nightmarish confessions... A political and psychological analysis of this accessible and unimpeachable material wholly and conclusively reveals the inquisitorial mechanics of the recantations. (The Case of Leon Trotsky (Secker and Warburg, 1938), p 486)
So Kostov, faced with a threat whose meaning he understood only too well, made his declarations of loyalty (to the Soviet Union, to the great Leader) and these ‘verbal acknowledgments of errors and guilt’. But that was only the first stage. It is now no longer a matter of errors and mistakes, but of criminal activity and guilt. Now details are required: he must ‘concretely set forth all the harm’ he has done, that is, he must accuse himself and others of working on behalf of the class enemy. The process by means of which Stalin assured his personal power in Russia must in the Iron Curtain countries be telescoped into the space of months. ‘Stringent measures’ have been demanded — ostensibly by the party members. But is it necessary to demonstrate the true source of this demand? Should there be any doubt about it, look at Kolarov’s own words: ‘The following question has also been raised almost everywhere: “Have Traicho Kostov’s errors no kinship with Titoism?"’
‘Almost everywhere’ is very good indeed!
Translate it into the language of real things and you get — ‘by Stalin’. In case there should be any mistake about it, Kolarov goes on:
There can be no doubt about kinship. Many party comrades ask: ‘Will not Traicho Kostov’s anti-Soviet conduct reflect badly on the attitude of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) towards our party?’ There is no doubt that it might have had a most fatal influence, had it not met with resolute resistance in the leadership of the party and among the members... The measures adopted against Traicho Kostov by the Central Committee manifested by the entire party have dispelled the last suspicions in the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) with regard to our party and its leadership. [Author’s emphasis]
Could one ask for a more striking admission of the real, basic reason for handing over Kostov to the executioner? — the reason that accounts equally for the downfall of Rajk, of Xoxe, of Gomulka, and many other leading Communists.
Kostov’s ‘errors’ are of course traced back into the distant past. Back in 1933 he had pursued a ‘left-sectarian’ course, proclaiming the Agrarian Union the ‘vanguard of fascist counter-revolution’. It will puzzle the reader to hear Kolarov speak in this fashion after his party has hanged the Agrarian leader Petkov for being a fascist counter-revolutionary — or, more exactly, for not confessing to being one. But the intellectual level of Communist Party membership does not oblige the leaders to be reasonable. This rigmarole about ‘left-sectarianism’ and so on is for inner-party consumption; the members know that a ‘left-sectarian’ is way off the party line; they know that in the distant past the Comintern condemned the Bulgarian party leadership for ‘left-sectarian’ tactics (condemned them, of course, only after events had proved the tactics false), and they also know that ‘left-sectarianism’ merges very easily into Trotskyism, which means being a police spy and so forth. That was why Kostov, at the beginning of the trial, wanted to speak on the question, to refute the charge in the indictment that he had followed the ‘left-sectarianism’ course, or at least to prove that he had not been alone in following it and that the temporary collapse of the Bulgarian party had nothing to do with betrayal from within. One fully appreciates the president’s refusal to allow him to speak about it.
There is scarcely a single leading figure in any Communist party who could not be shown to have at some time or other strayed from the path of virtue, because the numerous twists and turns of policy dictated by the Kremlin always catches someone napping, and in any case they have necessarily been proponents of the old course and can, if political scapegoats are required to reaffirm the Leader’s infallibility, be shown as having been too enthusiastic in their advocacy of the outdated course. Hence the peculiar and nauseating sessions of ‘self-criticism’, at which leaders, in order to hang on to their positions, beat their breasts and humbly admit their sins against the Stalin ‘line’, which is, has been, and always will be infallible. And this self-criticism is itself only the recantation in miniature, just as the recantation is an embryonic confession. As one of the defence counsel put it: ‘After 9 September in our courtrooms was introduced a Fatherland Front Court tradition — self-criticism.’ (The Trial of Traicho Kostov, p 599) Between self-criticism and confession there is a difference only of degree. So we have Kolarov saying: ‘Instead of entering upon a true self-criticism of his weighty offences, he continued in his attempts to deceive the party.’
As an example of Kostov’s attempts to hoodwink the party he refers to the publication, as late as 9 March, in the official newspaper Rabotnichesko Delo, of an article by Kostov, in which he praises the economic achievements of the country and expresses heartfelt gratitude for Soviet aid. The Editorial Board of this paper had been caught napping. They paid the penalty for not having the true vulture sense, which smells the carrion even before the blow is struck. ‘It is regretted that this article was published’, Kolarov abjectly kow-tows to his masters, ‘through the insufficient vigilance of the editors of the party organ, for which penalties have been applied.’
Kostov twisted and turned in an effort to shake off the pursuing pack. He wrote two ‘repenting’ declarations to the Politbureau, but this body ‘did not enter in his game and did not print his declarations’. No, because they amounted, in spite of all admissions of error, to a political defence. They were not ‘honest confessions’. So Moscow gives the thumbs down sign and party democracy ensures that no avenue of defence shall be left open to him. He will not reach the ear of the membership. Henceforth everything he says in his defence, every concession he makes short of a ‘full and concrete confession’, is only an effort to delude the party. They want his blood. Kolarov’s report proceeds to its menacing conclusion:
Today his name is synonymous with everything hostile to our party... The miserable remnants of the defeated monarcho-fascist clique, all the reactionaries... [etc, etc] unite under him. We know the rebuttal of Traicho Kostov: In what am I to blame if they uplift me as a banner of reaction and proclaim me as leader of the enemies of the party? And who is to blame? Can it be that the guilt is with the party? [Author’s emphasis] The enemies have sensed in Traicho Kostov all the rottenness that he did not confess, and on which he did not choose to subject himself to sincere self-criticism.
He is speaking of Traicho Kostov, member of the party and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Sofia Youth organisation in 1920; participant in the 1923 battle; imprisoned from 1924 to 1929; in the USSR from 1929 to 1931, working as a member of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian party; back in Bulgaria in 1931 editing illegal party publications; appointed Political Secretary in 1940; a partisan in the anti-Nazi resistance, 1941-42; in 1942 arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment; freed by the Liberation, 1944; a member of the National Committee of the Fatherland Front, 1945-46; deputy Prime Minister in the second Kimon Georgiev Cabinet of 1946, and also in the first Dimitrov Cabinet of 1946-47, serving at times as acting Premier; President of the Commission for Economic and Financial Affairs; framer of the 1947 Constitution...
Together with Kostov onto the rubbish heap of discarded tools went a host of lesser figures, for the most part Communists of long standing, few of whom survived the investigation of their dossiers made by Moscow’s agents. V Chervenkov, the new leader appointed by Moscow, made the following remarkable admission in his report to the January 1950 Plenum of the Central Committee:
The enemy orientated himself in particular on former Trotskyists, rationalists, right oppositionists, left-sectarians and also on people who had resided many years in the Western capitalist countries. Such people must always be studied carefully. (For a Lasting Peace, 17 February 1950 — author’s emphasis)
Comment is superfluous. Let the functionaries in the Western Communist parties note the implication. (Some have recently done so. The defections in the Italian party are not the first of their kind; they will not be the last.)
In this same report Chervenkov asks the question already put to him by another: ‘How was it that in the economic ministries and organs, the anti-Soviet directives of Kostovism were circulated and that no signal of alarm came from the Minister of the Interior?’ The question has now become purely rhetorical. Everyone knows the answer. Anton Yugov, the Minister of the Interior, is also a traitor — away with him!
It is unnecessary to analyse in any great detail the so-called proofs of the charges against the accused men at the trial. We need only look at the ‘defence’ put up by Kostov’s counsel to understand the completely hopeless situation of the accused. Here are some points drawn from his speech for the defence (needless to say that neither he nor any of the other defence counsels have made any attempt to cross-examine throughout the whole of the case).
He begins with the extraordinary statement: ‘Comrades Supreme Judges! I must make a confession before you.’ (The Trial of Traicho Kostov, p 561 — the infection is catching!) He then proceeds to apologise for defending his client, goes into a legal explanation defending the right to defend, points out that, whatever one may say, it is after all part of the country’s ‘Dimitrov Constitution’. He then explains the difference between bourgeois defence counsels and those appointed by the People’s Democracies. ‘The court, the prosecution and the defence have one common goal; to establish the truth — the actual, real truth.’ (Ibid, p 563) Not just the truth, mark you, but the actual, the real truth. One could not find a more cynical confirmation of the assertion made and proved in the course of this study that the whole apparatus of the court works in harmony to a prearranged end. The only thing he forgets to mention is that the accused have also this ‘common goal’.
Speaking of the confessions he says:
At these disclosures one’s hair stands on end. This was my feeling. I trust that it was the feeling of every honest person following this trial. You recall, for instance, those two first-rate spies, both of them Serbian women... who under the cover of some confessions and self-criticism, almost attempted to deceive you [small wonder his hair stood on end]. You recall the other one too, Darina, the teacher who among other things when defining her identity stated that she was 35 years old while in reality she looked 45 or 50 (commotion).
No, gentle reader, this isn’t Alice in Wonderland — this is a courtroom in which men are on trial for their lives. What explanation can there possibly be for this nonsense? It appears at first glance utterly incredible that this man should only be able to find from ‘among other things’ that a woman looked older than she said she was! And the ‘commotion’ is not the invention of the author, it appears in the printed report. For this, it must be admitted, we can find no explanation, but for the defence counsel’s point we think there is an explanation. He was simply mortally afraid of mentioning any fact having real bearing on the case — so in his anxiety not to raise anything controversial he tells us that the hair stood on end because a woman deceived, or attempted to deceive, and but for his vigilance might have deceived, the court about her age!
So he rants on in a long diatribe about Anglo-American imperialism, carefully rehearsed from the columns of Pravda, arriving at the conclusion that:
The incriminating facts in this case can be completely explained from an international point of view, when compared with the facts revealed in Budapest at the trial of László Rajk and his accomplices. We find much in common, because the cast is the same: back-stage stand the same people... But in our trial the picture broadens. New figures enter... [among these he gives Cicmil and Vukmanovic] (pp 565-66)
The consciousness of his own ticklish situation has evidently confused him, for he flounders into a dangerous comparison of the trial with a stage performance and gives as new performers the names of two men who had already played their parts (off-stage) in the Rajk trial. He then goes on to explain what confessions are; they ‘are explanations which the defendant gives before the court concerning the facts brought up against him in the indictment’ (p 567 — author’s emphasis). The confessions of today are different, he says, from those of the Middle Ages:
... because today confession is considered as an ordinary proof, the veracity of which is to be checked by confronting it with other proof material. And especially at a trial where there are several defendants. If their explanations [sic] are not entirely identical, then the court discovers the truth by comparing, by confronting the explanations of one defendant with those of the other defendants. In the same way, the explanations of the defendants must be confronted also with the other oral or written proofs. (p 567)
And so that there shall be absolutely no doubt that his ‘argument’ on the value of confessions is taken word for word from Vyshinsky — the prosecutor at the Moscow Trials — this defence counsel then touches on the verbal duel between Shawcross and Vyshinsky at a UNO meeting, in order to defend Vyshinsky! (One must not let slip any opportunity to curry favour with the great and mighty.) After this Traicho Kostov’s counsel admits with a sigh of relief that he is:
... faced with this accumulated material of proof just as you are faced with it. The co-defendants, all of them, confirmed the indictment. They confirmed the written confessions of Traicho Kostov. The witnesses did the same. My task, as Counsel for the Defence, faced with this exposing material, becomes difficult. I must evaluate, confront, compare. I want to elucidate to myself the actual factual position. (p 569)
But instead of doing what he said he had to do — that is, ‘evaluate, confront, compare’ — he simply says in the very next sentence that ‘it is my duty to declare before you in accordance with my conscience [sic]... I admit that the facts of the indictment are proved’. Never once does this gentleman raise the not unimportant point that his client has refused to confirm his ‘written confession’. The only time there is even an indirect indication of this is when, in the statement we have already quoted, he pleads with his client to confess — ‘his fate is in his own hands’.
‘With this declaration’, he continues, ‘does my situation become entirely hopeless here? Am I entirely superfluous in this trial?’ And answering his own question he once again lets the cat out of the bag. ‘Defence is never superfluous, even in the most difficult situation. After all, it may have a moral meaning as well, even if it cannot yield procedural results.’ (pp 569-70) He might as well have said it in so many words: Defence is simply a formality; it cannot aid the accused, but it enables the responsible authorities to claim that they were tried according to the due process of law.
After a timid reference to the fact that Kostov had spoken strongly against Tito’s policy — which he then hastily counters by admitting that this could have been part of his tactic to deceive the party — he advances in his client’s ‘favour’ the fact that Tito had already denounced him as a spy before his arrest and trial! ‘You see, it is a fact, it is true that Tito himself attacks and exposes Traicho Kostov.’ The prosecution regards this as merely another attempt to cover up the deep-laid espionage plot between Tito and Kostov, but for the counsel for the defence this has another meaning. For him it is simply an exposure of Tito. For how could Tito know that Kostov was a spy if the agents of Western imperialism had not told him so? Thus Tito exposes his connections with Western imperialism! Kostov’s counsel does not, of course, mention Tito’s proofs of his charge against Kostov, because they are, if that is possible, even more airy than the Bulgarian government’s. The basis of Tito’s charge boiled down to no more than that Kostov had not been executed by the pre-Fatherland Front regime. The motive behind this denunciation has never come to light. It is highly probable that before the Yugoslav-Russian break the anti-Kostov faction in the Bulgarian party sought Tito’s assistance in preparing material for possible future use against Kostov. Shady manoeuvres of this kind are part and parcel of the technique of the inner-party struggle for supremacy. At that time Tito would have thought nothing of using these methods, although subsequent experience may have shown him that evil means cannot achieve good ends. The fact remains, however, that the Yugoslav government advanced no proofs in support of its denunciation and made no further reference to it when they saw that Kostov had refused to confess.
Kostov’s counsel for defence concluded his remarks with the significant admission that ‘the sentence of the court will also have a historical, educational and wholesale significance’ (p 572 — author’s emphasis).
The above is an excellent illustration of the role of the defence counsels at these so-called trials. Not once during the whole of the Kostov trial did any of them find the courage to ask a single question of their clients that might have raised a doubt as to the veracity of their statements, or might have in any way aided their clients to rebut the charges made against them. But then, why should they have done so? The accused did not want to rebut the charges. Everything was cut and dried. The ‘examinations’ did not for the most part take place on the basis of question and answer but consisted of long propaganda speeches — in one instance occupying eleven consecutive pages of the report without a single question from anyone. And where questions were asked they were usually leading questions or quite obvious ‘cues’ for the next spate of propaganda.
It is interesting here to recall that when Georgi Dimitrov was before the Nazi court in Leipzig in the ‘Reichstag Fire Trial’ he made much of the refusal of the authorities to allow him counsel of his own choosing. ‘I recall that all the candidates proposed by me (the counsel Dechev, Giafferi, Campinchi, Torrez, Grigorov, Leo Gallagher of America and Dr Lehmann of Saarbrücken) were one after another eliminated by the Imperial Court on one pretext or another...’ (Georgi Dimitrov: A Short Biographical Sketch (Sofia, 1948), p 58) (By a curious twist of fate, one of the lawyers cited by Dimitrov was later to be refused an entry visa by the Rumanian People’s Democracy when he desired to defend Gheorghe Maniu — see Chapter X.) The issue here raised by Dimitrov, and made the utmost of by Communist propagandists all over the world, applies with equal force to East European postwar trials even although the accused were not, like him, in a position to raise the demand for counsel independent of the government. And, as we shall see in the next two chapters, where such a demand was raised the reply was no different from that given by the Nazi court.
Mr DN Pritt, who has appointed himself chief defender of these propaganda trials, said in a broadcast by the BBC that: ‘Where deep feelings are aroused, naturally or artificially, it is not the best atmosphere for judicial objectivity.’ (The Listener, 27 July 1950) But Mr Pritt was here being sweetly reasonable about the trial of Dr Emil Fuchs, the atomic spy.
He has at no time suggested that this same consideration might also apply to the Moscow Trials or Eastern European trials, notorious for their artificially worked-up atmosphere against the accused. Only someone deliberately shutting his eyes to the facts could make a comparison between the atmosphere in this country at the time of the Fuchs trial and the atmosphere that invariably surrounds the confession trials. Thus in the trial of Kostov even his refusal to confess was made to appear as confirmation of his guilt. And not only was this so in Bulgaria. Newspapers like the Czechoslovak Lidové Noviny (8 December 1949) tried at first to conceal the fact that he had pleaded not guilty, by saying: ‘Kostov avoided the main point of the indictment, as the presiding judge had often to admonish him to speak to the point.’ He ‘attempted to deny’, says this paper, referring to his point-blank denial. When the truth could no longer be concealed there was a concerted howl about Kostov’s ‘impudence’, his ‘insolence’ and so forth. The Hungarian Szabad Nép of 9 December 1949 offers us another fine example of honest reporting:
Kostov made impudent denials; he avoided referring to his own written deposition and did not give straight answers! ... When he got mixed up in his denials he tried to get out of the mess by fresh false statements. ... Kostov further described how he was organised by the British espionage service in 1942.
During the course of the trial the official Soviet paper Pravda carried a dainty morsel entitled ‘The Vermin Squirms’, by special correspondent P Golubev, in which Kostov’s refusal to accuse himself becomes his ‘insolent and vulpine evasions’. He ‘set himself the task of confusing the court by every method’. The article was obligingly broadcast by the Sofia radio on 9 December. This was the first open admission in Bulgaria that Kostov had pleaded not guilty. Among other points made in this broadcast was the following:
From his very first words it became clear that the court was faced with a shrewd, experienced and determined enemy aiming at confusing the court in all ways, diverting attention from the essence of the matter and averting the blow... His lying distortions and attempts to deny his earlier confessions have caused a wave of indignation among those present at the trial.
One could continue citing this kind of thing at great length, but this is enough to convince a normally intelligent person — if not Mr Pritt — that the atmosphere surrounding this trial was no more conducive to ‘judicial objectivity’ than any of its counterparts behind the Iron Curtain.
The ‘judicial objectivity’ of the court itself is made clear from its refusal to take any notice of the US Minister Mr Heath’s denial that he had, as the indictment charged, visited Kostov in 1947. Even had Mr Heath visited Kostov at that time it by no means necessarily follows that there was anything criminal in the visit. But if it were admitted, as Mr Heath categorically stated, that he had not seen Kostov at that — or any other — time, the prosecution would have had no opportunity of embroidering the ‘visit’ to suit a prearranged purpose of the trial. Mr Heath went to see Professor Kamenov (Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) on 3 December, and drew his attention to the fact that the Bulgarian press was repeating the allegations made in the indictment, which he, Mr Heath, had categorically denied. Professor Kamenov promised to see if corrective action could be taken. But the Bulgarian authorities refused to publish the following press statement issued by the US State Department on 1 December 1949:
From the date of his [Heath’s] arrival in Bulgaria in October 1947 to the present he has never had an interview of any kind with Traicho Kostov. In fact he has never exchanged a single word, oral or written, with him. This single fact affords ample basis for judging the veracity of the indictment.
The refusal of the Bulgarian government to allow the Bulgarian press to publish this is by itself sufficient demonstration of the ‘judicial objectivity’ of the whole trial.
Kostov stuck to his guns to the last. In his final plea he said: ‘I consider it the duty of my conscience to declare to the court and through it to Bulgarian public opinion, that I have never been at the service of British Intelligence, that I have never taken part in the criminal conspiratory plans of Tito and his clique...’
According to the printed report that was as far as they allowed him to go. The president interrupts ‘What do you want of the court?’
Kostov: ‘... that I have always had an attitude....’
Again the president interrupts him: ‘What do you want of the court?’
Kostov tries to go on: ‘... of respect and esteem for the Soviet Union.’
It is pitiful. What did he want of the court? Justice?
Kostov was sentenced to death. The others, who pleaded guilty on all counts, got off with more or less lengthy prison sentences. Back in the cells the same thing happened to him as to Petkov, resulting in a plea for mercy:
I plead guilty to the accusations brought before the court and fully confirm the depositions written in my own hand during the inquiry.
Realising barely at the last moment... regretting sincerely this conduct of mine which was a result of extremely excited nerves and the morbid self-love of an intellectual... I beg you to revoke the death sentence... and to commute it to close confinement for life.
They had to print it in facsimile — just to ‘prove’ it was ‘genuine’. But the Kremlin kept its thumbs down.
God knows what he suffered, morally and physically, before they strangled him to death.
1. An article in Rabotnichesko Delo, published before the trial opened, made an undisguised acknowledgment of its political purpose: ‘The indictment is a powerful weapon in the hands of the Fatherland Front during the election campaign. All the data in the indictment must be conveyed down to the last citizen in the last rural hamlet. The country must manifest its unity in the Fatherland Front by a great election victory on 18 December which will close the lips of the slanderers in Belgrade and the Voice of America.’