Barbara Falk

During the early Cold War, domestic justice was politicized in the service of the larger international conflict. Targeting the “enemy within” happened in both “East” and “West.” The persecution and prosecution of real and perceived adversaries was a hallmark of this new form of conflict, one that required internal purges as much as external state strategy and military posturing. Political trials were a prominent feature in the “early, hot” phase of the Cold War and helped both the United States and the Soviet Union to “construct” the Cold War—each in opposition to its ideological and political other. This project seeks to compare and analyze four Cold War prosecutions as political trials within the larger context of the construction of the superpower conflict: the 1949 Rajk trial in Hungary, and the 1952 Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, as well as the 1949 Dennis trial and the 1951 Rosenberg-Sobell trial in the United States.