Edible Revolutionaries
The Rudolf Slánský Trial as a Romance
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375690 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Steiner (0000-0003-1076-2626, University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-28 |
| Publication date | 2016-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/03335372-3452598 |
| OpenAlex | W2401347978 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
One of the most unique phenomena of the Stalinist political culture was the political trials of leading Communist functionaries that took place in the Soviet Union and the people's democracies from the 1930s to the 1950s, usually culminating with the defendants' executions. The distinctive features of all these miscarriages of justice were the public confessions of the accused to the most heinous felonies against the party and the Socialist regime with which they were charged. What was the reason for this? My article scrutinizes, from the generic perspective, the proceedings of the trial against the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slánský, and his thirteen codefendants, which took place in Prague in November 1952, and argues that it was emplotted as a romance. The public confessions, then, functioned as the narrative's "happy ending," conditio sine qua non of the genre. Through them the malefactors willingly repenting the sins of the past demonstratively returned to the party's fold, and the party, in turn, claimed yet another victory in its ongoing war on the bourgeoisie
Art · Bourgeoisie · Communism · Literature · Political science · Politics · Romance · Socialism · Victory · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · History · Law · Soviet and Russian History
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The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Main Currents of Marxism
Phenomenology of Spirit
Tragedy Walks the Streets
The Secular Scripture
The Collective and the Individual in Russia
The Enemy on Trial
Structural Semantics
Stalin in Power
A Paradigm Lost? Response to Anna Krylova
Imagined communities
About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self
Samokritika Rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933-38
The Political Unconscious
With Hegel to Salvation
The Tragic Farce of Marx, Hegel, and Engels
Between Instinct and Mind
Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm
Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |