Yes, I would like to receive periodic updates and information via e-mail from Commentary.

Recipient Addresses:

Separate each address with a comma.

Your E-mail Address: Message:

In late April of this year, a weird treason trial took place in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, which deserved more than the few lines it got in a late city edition of the metropolitan newspapers. Here was no routine operation of the totalitarian justice-mill such as the outside world has become inured to, those daily court proceedings in Communist countries in which some poor devils confess to espionage and sabotage in the service of Wall Street. These victims were no “mere” workers who failed to fulfill their norms, peasants who did not deliver enough grain, clergymen or believers who opposed the Gleichschaltung of their community, or citizens who let slip a few words of criticism. The defendants in this case had belonged to the highest circles of Slovak Communism. One of them, Gustav Husak, had been the Premier of Slovakia's semi-autonomous cabinet. With him in the dock were his Minister of the Interior, Daniel Okali; Minister of Education, Laco Novomesky, a poet and the best-known Slovak Communist writer; and the Minister for Religious Affairs, Laco Holdos, who was a member of Communism's “Spanish aristocracy,” having fought under GPU orders in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. The fifth defendant, Ivan Horvath, was the former Czechoslovakian envoy to Hungary. All had been members of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia or of its Slovak branch.

Except for Holdos, who was of working class origin, all of these men had been radical Slovak intellectuals who joined the Communist movement in their student days. They had gathered around an avant-garde magazine, Dav (“The Masses”), which demanded the “national” as well as the “social” liberation of the Slovak people. “Social liberation” was a circumlocution for Communist rule, but “national liberation” meant Slovakia's independence from the Czechs, within, however, the framework of some Communist world federation. On orders from Moscow, the Czechoslovak Communist party had supported the slogan of Slovak independence from the middle 20's on; such slogans were always handy sticks with which to belabor the “imperialists,” among whom pre-war Czechoslovakia, allied with France, was numbered.

---

© 2009 Commentary Inc.