Word: gottwald
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Communist world, a hell which Dante might have found hard to describe, a kind of diabolical retribution lurks everywhere. Rudolf Slansky was one of the main architects of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948; after that, he reached the pinnacle of power. His main rival was President Klement Gottwald, who seemed immovably imbedded, like a great rock, in the Czech party...
Less than two years ago, Slansky purged one of Gottwald's close friends and loyal followers, Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis. Last week Clementis sat on the wooden benches with Slansky-a codefendant. Less than two years ago, Slansky engineered the spy trial of the American A.P. Correspondent William Oatis (who had been trying to find out what happened to Clementis) in the same courtroom of Pankrac prison. The same judges, prosecutor and "defense attorney" who served in the Oatis case last week confronted Rudolf Slansky. So it goes in the Communist inferno...
Slansky said that he had plotted with Gottwald's doctors in an attempt on the President's life; that he had planted "French agents, British agents, American agents, Yugoslav agents," and told them the secrets of the Czech armed forces and workers' organizations. He implicated, as foreign contacts, former British M.P. Konni Zilliacus, who once fellow-traveled with Stalin and now does with Tito, and Moshe Pijade, a Jewish ideologist in the Tito regime. He said he had given important jobs to "capitalist Jewish emigrants who returned to Czechoslovakia as imperialist agents." According to the indictment...
...various jobs in the government or party. But not Vladimir Clementis, a deadly enemy. In 1949, Clementis was representing his country at the U.N. in New York when he heard the first rumblings from home that Slansky had the knife out. On U.S. soil, Clementis felt safe. But President Gottwald sent Clementis' wife to New York to reassure him that he could safely come home. Clementis returned to Prague, and then found that Gottwald could not or would not shield...
Last week Clementis identified himself as a spy and traitor, and said that, like Slansky, he had tried to kill Gottwald, his dear friend. He fingered John Foster Dulles of the U.S., Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb, and Ales Bebler of Yugoslavia as "spies." Ludvik Frejka, author of the Czechoslovak two-and five-year plans, took the stand to confess: "I sabotaged in such a way that there is still rationing of electricity and food in Czechoslovakia." The wife of accused former Deputy Foreign Minister Arthur London wrote the court that she at first believed her husband innocent...