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Branislav Kinčok: Case That Did Not Turn to a Trial. Anti-Party Group Karol Šmidke et al.

The machinery of show political trials in the years 1948 to 1954 did not pass around even significant Slovak and Czech communist functionaries, although many of them helped, more or less, implementing mass persecutions in daily practice. One of them was Karol Šmidke, former chairman of the Communist Party of Slovakia and chairman of the Slovak National Council, who called the attention of State Security in 1949. Gradually the case called Karol Šmidke et al. was fabricated around his person, but it did not lead to a political trial. Just the contrary, the case was closed by releasing members of the group from the pre-trial detention, whereas Karol Šmidke had not been arrested at all. The author has been analysing main development phases of that, till now untreated case; at the beginning he deals with its political background and gradually he presents the efforts of investigators to accuse Karol Šmidke and his companions from so-called bourgeois nationalism and Titoism.

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