Behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, the Red hunt bore down implacably on party heretics, class enemies and "agents of Western imperialism." Most spectacular was the Vogeler trial in Hungary (see above). The pattern elsewhere:
In Rumania, said the Cominform Journal, a "verification" purge had cleansed the party of 180,000 "alien class elements, opportunists and Titoite agents."
In Czechoslovakia, the hunters stalked the countryside for a new quarry: farmers who owned more than 50 acres of land. The new "class enemies" were packed off to forced labor; their land was confiscated. Prague also named a pro-Communist priest, Dean Jan Dechet, to administer...
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