The Modern Inquisition. Hugo Dewar 1953
The mopping-up operations in the Communist parties of the satellite states mark the beginning of the end phase of a process aiming at the Russification of the Soviet Union’s postwar territorial acquisitions.
The liquidation of so-called ‘extreme’, or Zhdanovite, Communists in Czechoslovakia, Rumania or elsewhere does not imply any change of policy on the part of the Soviet Union. That policy cannot change without a fundamental change within the Soviet Union, of which there are as yet no observable signs. The domestic policy of the Soviet Union is inevitably mirrored in its foreign policy; the iron control of the regime over the people at home is reflected in the iron control of its subject people abroad.
To what lengths of repression the Soviet government is prepared to go is most strikingly seen in its measures against members of the religious sect known as Jehovah’s Witnesses; most strikingly, because it is apparently meaningless repression for the sake of repression, against a body with little following and no political or social influence. If the trials involving these people were not for them so tragic, they would cause only astonished derision. For the anti-war, anti-militarist attitude of this sect is too well known to require emphasis. It is these people that the Russian government, through the instrumentality of its East German puppets, puts on trial as warmongers and espionage agents of the West! Reading accounts of these events, one finds it hard to believe one’s eyes. Yet there it is, in black on white. On 31 August 1950, a statement of the East German Ministry of State charged the Jehovah’s Witnesses with ‘war propaganda, criminal activities against peace and cooperation with secret services of a foreign power. The previous day this sect, of which there are estimated to be about 50 000 in Eastern Germany, was banned by the government. A major count against them was their refusal to sign the Communist-organised Stockholm ‘Peace Appeal’. On 3 September a trial of nine young Witnesses took place and savage sentences were meted out to all the accused: penal servitude for life for Willi Heinicke and Friedrich Adler, sentences ranging from eight to fifteen years for the seven others. They were all found guilty of conducting ‘war propaganda on orders from American imperialism’. There were many other trials of members of the sect, resulting in equally savage sentences. Meaningless as these repressive measures seem, they are not really so. In the countries where Stalin’s writ runs the pacifist speaks with the voice of the government — or he does not speak at all.
Thus there is no single path along which the contraband of independent thought might flow that the Russian government does not seek to block with barbed wire and to command with bullets.
A record of all the political trials that have taken place in Russia’s postwar territorial acquisitions would fill hundreds of volumes. Most of those tried are hostile to the dictatorship imposed by Russia, and they are drawn from all classes of society. No one would suggest that among them are no agents of foreign powers; in the given international situation it is inevitable that there should be, just as there are Russian agents operating, in vastly more favourable circumstances, in the West. But with the systematic tightening of the stranglehold on all free political life in the Soviet sphere all opposition to the regime, of whatever character, is forced into ‘illegal’ channels, and every oppositionist, no matter what his or her political views, is castigated and mercilessly persecuted as an espionage agent of the Western imperialists. And there is now no longer any need for us to ask: why do they confess? The ferocious sentences meted out for the slightest sign of anti-government activity — even for a suggestion of non-conformist thinking — are designed to terrorise opponents into silence, resignation, apathy. These draconian punishments are symptomatic of the insecure foundations on which the structure of Soviet power rests.
There are sincere, but extremely short-sighted, persons (we here, of course, exclude the Stalinists) who manage to see in all this a revolutionary change sponsored by the Russian government for the benefit of the common people of Eastern Europe. They can come to such a conclusion only through ignoring reality. The following statement contains Stalin’s own explanation of Soviet policy with regard to these countries:
The Germans made their invasion of the USSR through Finland, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary. The Germans were able to make their invasion through these countries because, at the time, governments hostile to the Soviet Union existed in these countries... And so what can be surprising about the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, is trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries? (Soviet News pamphlet, 1947; text of Stalin’s interview to press correspondents, etc; author’s emphasis)
It could not be put more bluntly. Stalin’s frank statement, never since repeated and now almost forgotten, confirms our analysis of the basic purpose of the confession trials in the countries concerned.
Yes, the Soviet government ‘is trying to see to it that governments loyal... to the Soviet Union should exist in those countries’. And by what incredibly monstrous means it pursues its objective!
Stalin’s Inquisition takes hold of its victims — his own creatures among them — bends and binds them to its will by inhuman psychological torture, prepares the stage, and presents to the entire world its gruesome, repulsive show. By speech and article, in the press and on the wireless, by book and by pamphlet, it spreads to the world through countless channels the confessions of its victims, knowing these confessions false, knowing the means by which they were obtained. Without pity, without conscience, without honour, without even the most elementary human decency, it does not shrink from compelling a wife to demand the death of her husband, a son to demand the death of his father, knowing them innocent of the crimes with which they are charged.
And this modern Inquisition has the brazen effrontery to present its macabre productions to the world as the dispensation of justice. Not just here and there a dull-witted fool, a miserable hireling, but governments, their entire legal professions, their orators, writers, artists, intellectuals — proclaim this lie to be the truth. One stands appalled at the magnitude of the fraud they seek to impose on the world, the iniquity, the degradation of it. Do they really imagine it possible to make people believe in these enormities, the confession trials?
Yes, they believe it is possible — they know it is possible. Not all of the world is living in the twentieth century.