Holding the post of the party's General Secretary after World War II, he was one of the leading creators and organizers of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

In Czechoslovakia, Slánský was one of 14 leaders arrested in 1951, tortured into confessing their "crimes", and put on show trial en masse in November 1952, charged with high treason.

After the end of World War I, he went to Prague, the capital, where he discovered a leftist intellectual scene in institutions such as the Marxist Club.

After Nazi Germany occupied the Sudetenland in October 1938, Slánský, along with much of the rest of the Czechoslovak communist leadership, fled to the Soviet Union.

His experience in Moscow brought him into contact with Soviet Communists and the often brutal methods they favored for maintaining party discipline.

In 1945, after World War II, Slánský and other Czechoslovak leaders returned from exile in London and Moscow, holding meetings to organize the new National Front government under Edvard Beneš.

In 1951, after Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia broke with him, Stalin decided to "purge" the Communist parties of the satellite countries of the Soviet Union in order to deter any further revolts against his rule.

Most historians think that, fearing arrest and death, President Gottwald of Czechoslovakia decided to sacrifice his best friend, Rudolf Slánský, in order to save himself.

Party rhetoric asserted that Slánský was spying as part of an international western capitalist conspiracy to undermine socialism and that punishing him would avenge the Nazi murders of Czech communists Jan Šverma and Julius Fučík during World War II.

Some historians say that Stalin desired complete obedience from leaders of the so-called "People's Democracies" (that is, Eastern bloc countries), as well as at home.

Stalin backed Gottwald because he was believed to have a better chance of building up the Czechoslovak economy into a position where it could start producing useful goods for the Soviet Union.

After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the new president Václav Havel, appointed Slánský's son, also named Rudolf, as the Czech ambassador to the Soviet Union.