27-12-2008, 01:50 PM
Magda Hassan Wrote:Paul, I am finding this thread most interesting. I am also reading ACA at the moment. It has been 25 years or more since I delved into Soviet politics and even then it was for other reasons that what I am interested to know now. Do you or any one else here know any good information (in English preferably) on factions with in the Soviet power structures over the years? Worth a try, hey?
I found Boris I. Nicolaevsky's "Power and the Soviet Elite: 'The Letter of an Old Bolshevik' and other Essays" (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966), edited by Janet D. Zagoria, a very useful place to start. The same author wrote a number of very interesting and informative pieces for The New Leader in the late 40s and the 50s.
The best English-language overview of Beria and his policies I've come across is Amy Knight's "Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant" (Princeton UP, 1993). On p.169, for example, Knight illustrates the clear link between Kremlin power struggles and the purges in Eastern Europe. The missing dimension, of course, it what the CIA and its directors were up to, all of which is a no-no for Knight:
Quote:The Prague trial can be seen as a forerunner of the subsequent Doctors' Plot trial in Moscow, In fact, the charge of political murder by doctors introduced in Prague was to be a central theme, along with Zionism, of the Doctors' Plot.
As Knight notes, Slanksy and Bedrich Geminder were Beria's men: "...acting with Beria's sanction, they had made Czechoslovakia a center for funneling aid and weapons to Isreal..." (Ibid.)
At one point in the same book, Knight claims that the truth of Beria's reform programme (and much else) was hidden until recent revelations. This is purest balls, as we shall now see.
In Nicolaevsky's "Power and the Soviet Elite: 'The Letter of an Old Bolshevik' and other Essays," there is reproduced an article first published in Sotsialistichesky Vestnik in 1955, wherein the author notes: "We know definitely that while living in the USSR, Slansky and Geminder were high-ranking officials of the MVD-MGB and that they maintained this connection later, when they held major posts in their own country. Geminder had a direct telephone line the MGB in Moscow; those who arrested him knew this, and the first thing they did was to cut off his line to Moscow."
In a footnote on the same page added in 1964, Nicolaevsky stated baldly that Slansky had acted "on the instructions of Beria" in the arms flows to Israel.
CIA knew all of this in real-time, it almost goes without saying, and acted accordingly. Bolstering Soviet anti-semitism was no great leap for a man as inhumane as Allen Dulles, of course, who never once batted an eyelid at the same tactic in Germany. Evica misses a trick here, I can't help thinking.
Paul