The Press TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 1949. Communist “Trials”

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25741, 1 March 1949, Page 4

The Press TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 1949. Communist “Trials”

The treason trials in Bulgaria are following the familiar pattern of political trials in Russia and the satellite States. The accused, who are leaders of various religious denominations, are tearfully confessing before reoresentatives of other governments and the world’s press their crimes against the Communist State, ranging from treason and espionage to supplying America with “ information on the people’s “ attitude toward the Communists And they are all proclaiming their conversion and their highly improbable change of heart. Nobody expected anything else; the pattern is ordained. It is a trick which has puzzled the world for 20 years; and no one outside the Eastern block can yet say with certainty how it is brought off, infallibly, every time. “ Scrutator ”, who recently devoted his well-informed column in the “ Sunday Times ” to a consideration of this question, pointed out that there was one exception to the regularity of these happenings—the trial of the British engineers in Moscow in 1933, when only one of the accused “ confessed ” to the incredible charges of sabotaging their own work. The key to the answer no doubt is to be found in the fact that the accused persons appear in court after weeks of “ interroga-

“ tion ’’ in prison. It used to be thought that the confessions were obtained by torture or by threats to harm the victims’ relatives; but “ Scrutator ” remarks that it is difficult to torture a man without his showing traces of it when he comes into court, or to press him by threats against relatives if he is a celibate priest whose parents are dead. Drugs and hypnotism are other common suggestions; and the writer inclines to the belief that both are used in combination by the interrogators who “ are em- “ ployed for weeks on end in the “ secrecy of a prison to strip off the “ prisoner’s psychological armour “ and conquer the defences of his “ mind

These, he admits, are only conjectures, because no prisoners have yet been released to tell the world how their minds were mastered; nor, if they were, could they themselves, in all probability, do more than guess at what had been done to them.

Yet it is hardly believable that all those confessions drop automatically out of the . guilty hearts of the prisoners. Human nature and human experience are all against it; and the refugees who escape to the West from Iron Curtain countries seem to be in no doubt that the Soviet authorities have special, very powerful levers at their disposal. Cardinal Mindszenty himself clearly shared this common conviction when in November last he wrote his now famous letter saying that, if he were arrested, any confession he might be induced to make should be regarded “as a consequence of human frailty.” and, he went, on, “in advance I declare it hull and void.” This declaration he expressly recanted during his trial; but, of course, no more value attaches to a recantation in court than to the rest of his evidence there, which, as a whole, conformed to the regular pathe said everything that the prosecution wanted him to say and much that, before he went to prison, few would have conceived of his saying. He had never before shown himself other than a man of remarkably strong character; but he had foreseen only too well the limits of the human organism’s resistance to such welltried pressures as the Communist prisons use to crush it.

Two other aspects of these political trials in general and the present trials of religious leaders in particular are the subject of interesting comment. The writer rightly points out that these are not “ trials ” in the judicial sense; they are elab-, orately staged performances to demonstrate the guilt of the accused, whose conviction -is not in doubt once he is arrested. The court represents the will of the “ proletarian dictatorship ”. But the government also desires the conviction to be placed formally beyond dispute; which it* can be only if the prisoners confess. Accordingly, they all do confess. “ Scrutator ” also remarks that the decision to arrest and convict the outstanding Roman Catholic leader in a mainly Roman Catholic country was surely made not in Budapest but in Moscow; and it was timed in relation to other anti-religious steps in other satellite countries. He derides the naive tendency of some English commentators to take the disclaimers of anti-religious motive at their face value, when everything suggests that Russia is trying in her satellite countries to deprive the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches of their- leading figures. The Kremlin, he remarks, has sufficient elementary sense not to prosecute them on religious grounds. Instead it charges them with secular offences that serve equally well. “ But it is not irrelevant nor acci- “ dental ”, he adds. “ that orthodox “ Communism is anti-religious and “ views Christianity as something “ to be got rid of ”.