Prague Trials - Definition and Overview

The Prague Trials were a series of Stalinist and largely anti-Semitic show trials in Czechoslovakia. On November 20, 1952 Rudolf Slánský, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and 13 other Communist leaders (11 of them Jews) were accused of participating in a Trotskyite-Titoite-Zionist conspiracy, convicted and executed. The trials were the result of a split within the Communist leadership on the degree to which the state should emulate the Soviet Union and was part of a Stalin inspired purge of "disloyal" elements in the national Communist parties in Eastern Europe as well as a purge of Jews from the leadership of Communist parties.

The processes were widely considered an extension of Stalin's 1948-1953 anti-Semitic campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans", and took place between the arrests and executions of Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union and the so-called Doctors' plot of early 1953.

The Prague Trials were dramatised in the 1970 movie L'Aveu (the Confession) directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. The film was based on the book of the same name by Artur London, who was a survivor of the trials.

See also

• Solomon Mikhoels
• Itzik Feffer
• Ilya Ehrenburg
• History of anti-Semitism