Year of Purges

In 1949, the life expectancy of the average Communist bigwig went down sharply. Not since the Great Purge of 1936-38 had the leadership of world Communism been so rent by fear and division. No leaders of Western Communism had yet been ousted (see below), but behind the Iron Curtain heads fell fast & furiously. Prime focus of the Comrades' trouble in the Russian satellite countries was Yugoslavia Heretic Marshal Tito, who continued to defy Moscow. But it was also a great year for purges inside Russia, where Georgy Malenkov, the Kremlin's rising star, quietly disposed of the last followers of his old rival, the late Andrei Zhdanov.

The Russian victims all disappeared without a trace. Chief among them were:

Nikolai A. Voznesensky, member of the Politburo, chairman of the Gosplan(State Planning Commission).

Ivan T. Golyakov, president of the Soviet Supreme Court.

Alexei S. Kuznetsov, secretary of the Party Central Committee and member of the powerful Orgburo.

Colonel General Iosif V. Shikin, chief of the Central Political Administration of the Soviet Armed Forces, i.e., boss of all Red army "indoctrination."

The Titoists of Eastern Europe met various fates:

General Vafiades Markos, Greek Communist guerrilla chieftain, was presumably shot on orders from Moscow in February.

Koci Xoxe, Albanian Interior Minister, was shot in June.

Peter Gabor, Budapest's bloodthirsty police chief, committed suicide in his prison cell last August.

Laszlo Rajk, Foreign Minister and Hungary's wartime underground leader, was hanged in October.

Wladyslaw Gomulka, once Poland's No. 1 Communist, was dropped from the Party Central Committee in November, is now in prison awaiting trial for treason.

Traicho Rostov, onetime Secretary General of the Bulgarian Communist Party, was hanged last month.

There was scarcely a Communist leader in the Russian satellite countries who in 1949 had not been reported under Moscow's suspicion and on the verge of death or demotion. Nobody in the West could be quite sure who was in high favor or in hot water. Western observers thought that the likeliest purge candidates for 1950 were Rumania's Ana Pauker (who was conspicuously absent from the last Cominform conclave), Czechoslovakia's President Klement Gottwald and Foreign Minister Vladimir dementis.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.