Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (52 page)

The book’s appearance in France in 1947 caused a sensation. It sold 400,000 copies and received the Prix Sainte-Beuve, yet such was the power of the Communist Party in the publishing world that none of the major houses had dared touch it.

The party denounced all the book’s allegations, especially the idea that there were labour camps in the Soviet Union.
Les Lettres françaises
led the attack on 13 November 1947 with an article signed ‘SimThomas’, supposedly a former officer of the American OSS. This piece claimed that American intelligence agents had written the book, not Kravchenko, who was dismissed as an alcoholic and compulsive liar. There were other insulting articles by the Communist writer André Wurmser. On hearing of these attacks, Kravchenko, who had temporarily settled in the United States, launched a libel case against ‘Sim Thomas’, André Wurmser,
Les Lettres françaises
and its director, Claude Morgan, a former right-winger who had turned Communist.

When the trial opened on 24 January 1949, the Palais de Justice was overrun by newsreel crews, journalists and press photographers. A company of the Garde Républicaine had to be brought in to restore order. The scope and significance of the battle taking place in the overcrowded courtroom quickly became clear. However much the defence tried to turn the case into a trial of Kravchenko’s character, it remained what Kravchenko had intended it to be: a tribunal by proxy of the Soviet Union and Stalinism. Both sides brought in their witnesses, entirely at the plaintiff’s expense. Although the American authorities provided no financial aid, they helped Kravchenko assemble Ukrainians from displaced persons’ camps in Germany who could testify to conditions during the 1930s.

The
Lettres françaises
defence team turned to the Soviet Union for witnesses. The NKVD rounded up individuals who could be persuaded to blacken Kravchenko’s character and veracity. The most vulnerable of all was Kravchenko’s first wife, because her father, a former officer in the White Army, was still in a prison camp.

Before the Soviet witnesses appeared, the defence tried to play the card of French patriotism against a defector and thus a deserter in wartime. When Kravchenko’s counsel countered with the question of Thorez’s desertion in 1939 and Wurmser’s lawyer, Maître Nordmann, demanded, ‘
Un peu de respect pour ce grand homme politique français
’, there was an outburst of derisive laughter in court.

Because the vast majority of the public present openly supported Kravchenko, the Communist press claimed that the benches were packed with women from the
beaux quartiers
in fur coats. It is true that this trial had become such a sensation in Paris that American bars were offering an ‘I-Chose-Freedom’ cocktail, a mixture of whisky and vodka, as a publicity gimmick. Many people did come to the trial to see Communist noses rubbed in the dirt – André Gide would hardly have been human if he had not relished the prospect after what
Les Lettres françaises
had said about him. But many others came who were not prejudiced against the defendants, such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Nordmann brought in the most prominent fellow-travellers available to express their disdain for Kravchenko – Pierre Cot, the aviation minister in the Popular Front government of 1936, Louis Martin-Chauffier, the president of the National Committee of Writers, Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, Dr Hewlett-Johnson and General Petit – as well as Communist writers Pierre Courtade, Vercors and Wurmser’s brother-in-law, Jean Cassou – the former Communist minister Ferdinand Grenier (who gave his profession as bakery worker) and the ubiquitous Nobel laureate Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who, during his testimony, proceeded to defend the Moscow show trials of the 1930s. The one witness the defence never produced was ‘Sim Thomas’, the alleged American author of the original article. He did not exist. The author had in fact been André Ulmann, editor of the Soviet-backed
Tribune des nations
.

On 7 February, Kravchenko’s former wife, Zinaïda Gorlova, made her appearance for the defence. The courtroom became tense with anticipation. ‘She’s a prepossessing blonde,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘thirtysix years old, with what used to be called “advantages” which are tightly restrained in a corset. She wears a black dress. Her face is pale, with a closed expression.’ Gorlova had been flown into Paris with a woman guard, presumably from the NKVD, who escorted her everywhere from an apartment rented by the Soviet Embassy in the Boulevard Suchet. In a voice which sounded monotonous from over-rehearsal, she recounted that Kravchenko had beaten her, broken china and forced her to have an abortion. He was a liar, a womanizer and a drunkard.

Kravchenko’s lawyer, Maître Georges Izard, had little difficulty in making the poor woman squirm. She refused to admit that her father was either a former White Guard or in a prison camp. She claimed that he was dead. She had never seen the scenes of famine in the Ukraine which Kravchenko had claimed to witness with her. The effort was so great for her that she had to ask for a chair so that she could sit down. Nordmann, for the defence, tried to stop Kravchenko speaking to his former wife. The president of the court told him to be quiet. A furious row broke out between them, and in the uproar Gorlova continued to repeat mechanically the insults against her former husband. ‘Always the same recording!’ Kravchenko yelled, as the president of the court brought the session to a hurried close.

The proceedings were often chaotic. One exchange led to Kravchenko throwing himself at Wurmser, before being dragged back by a gendarme. Many of his remarks were not only clever and funny; they cut to the bone, to the delight of his supporters on the public benches. Claude Morgan, on another occasion, burst out: ‘They’re not the public, they’re
cagoulards
!’ André Wurmser, too, could not contain his unfeigned outrage that a man he considered a traitor should be allowed a public hearing.

Over the next few days, Gorlova’s appearance changed. She had become listless, her face looked yellow, her hair was unkempt, she had lost weight. Kravchenko felt sorry for her, knowing that her failure to make an impression boded ill for her and her family. ‘She did not come to France voluntarily,’ he cried to the court. He promised to look after her in the West for the rest of her life. ‘But she must say why she came here!’ The courtroom was electrified. Gorlova collapsed, vainly searching for a handkerchief in her handbag. Her female guard sat frozen beside her. Before the court reassembled, Gorlova was taken to Orly, where a Soviet military aircraft was waiting to fly her back to the Soviet Union.

It was then Kravchenko’s turn to call his witnesses. Almost all came from camps for displaced persons in Germany, but his most effective witness had arrived from Stockholm. This was Margarete Buber-Neumann, the widow of a pre-war leader of the German Communist Party, Heinz Neumann. On Hitler’s rise to power the couple had sought refuge in Russia, but were sent to Soviet labour camps, accused of political deviationism.

In 1940, after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, the Soviet Union handed them and some German Jews over to the Nazis. Margarete Buber-Neumann survived five years in Ravensbrück and managed to escape just before the Red Army arrived. According to Galtier-Boissière, who was watching closely, Claude Morgan and André Wurmser looked down at the ground during her description of the Soviet labour camps. Her account was clear and unflinching in every detail, and revealed an astonishing courage and stamina. Only the most fanatical Stalinist could have disbelieved her. That other Communist renegade, Arthur Koestler, exulted at the effect of her contribution. Buber-Neumann went to stay with him and Mamaine Paget for a couple of days.

The verdict in Kravchenko’s favour was announced on 4 April, the same day as the signature of the North Atlantic Alliance. Almost as if to prove his point, the press in Russia claimed the opposite: that Kravchenko’s case had collapsed before the truth of the Soviet position. Yet news of the Communist defeat in Paris still reached Solzhenitsyn in the prison camp of Kuibyshev, bringing a glimmer of hope.

The trial, coming after the Communist Party’s reverses in 1947 and 1948, began to convince France that the Soviet Union was not a workers’ paradise. The debates in the courtroom launched a wave of cynicism and people were no longer frightened of criticizing the Communists openly. On the last day of the month, the anti-Stalinist left held a conference at the Sorbonne on war and dictatorship, an event unthinkable two years before.

On 20 April, just over two weeks after the end of the trial, the Soviet Union tried a new tactic. The French Communist Party launched the Mouvement de la Paix at a meeting at the Salle Pleyel, presided over by Professor Joliot-Curie. Picasso’s dove, the emblem of the movement, was prominently displayed. A mass meeting followed on the same day and soon propaganda posters with the dove covered walls across the city. It was not long before an anti-Communist group, Paix et Liberté, began to produce counter-propaganda. The dove of peace was portrayed as a Russian bomber – ‘
La colombe qui fait boum!
’ – in a poster campaign designed to challenge the Communists’ virtual monopoly of the walls of Paris.

At the time of the Kravchenko trial, Koestler and Mamaine moved into a house called Verte Rive on the Seine at Fontainebleau. Just as they were moving, a fresh row exploded, only this time Koestler took Sartre and Beauvoir’s side against André Malraux. Malraux had been outraged by a recent attack on himin
Les Temps modernes,
and Gaston Gallimard had suddenly withdrawn his support for the publication. Sartre and Beauvoir discovered that Malraux had apparently threatened to expose Gallimard’s record during the Occupation if he continued to support
Les Temps modernes
.

Mamaine Paget recalled the evening of 1 March 1949, when Koestler ‘bearded’ Malraux. ‘At first when K. asked him about this, Malraux made evasive replies, but finally he more or less admitted that it was true… K. feels that his great faith in and friendship with Malraux is at an end – it really was a stinking thing to do… in fact, simply blackmail.’

The last joint outing of the three couples – Koestler, Sartre, Camus – had a certain air of
déjà vu,
although this time they did not go to the Schéhérazade, but to the Troïka, another smart nightclub run by White Russians.

A few days later, Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir discussed the evening. Camus asked: ‘Do you think we can honestly go on drinking like that and work?’ When Sartre and Beauvoir next encountered Koestler outside the Hotel Pont-Royal and he suggested that they should all meet up again, Sartre took out his diary as a matter of habit, then stopped himself.

‘We’ve nothing more to say to each other.’

‘Surely we’re not going to mess everything up for purely political reasons!’ Koestler protested.

‘When one has such different opinions,’ Sartre replied, ‘one can’t even see a film together.’

Koestler, who did not duck his share of the blame for the ending of their friendship, encountered Sartre again in June 1950 at the Gare de l’Est. They were both taking the overnight train to Germany. Koestler and Mamaine, now his wife, were off to Berlin for the Congress of Cultural Freedom, while Sartre was leaving for a conference in Frankfurt. Without the disapproving presence of Simone de Beauvoir, they shared their picnic supper with Sartre, along with two anti-Communist Poles and a police bodyguard assigned to Koestler by the Sûreté after he had received death threats from the Communists.

Sartre, although looking very ill – according to Mamaine, he was virtually living off a form of amphetamine called Corydrane – made a great effort and they had an amusing time together. But Koestler and Mamaine felt sorry for him. ‘On that evening in the sleeping-car,’ Koestler wrote at the end of his life, ‘Sartre complained that they hardly went out in the evening because there were so few people left with whom they agreed about politics.’

The year 1949 saw a wave of doubt among many Communist intellectuals. Both Vercors and Jean Cassou, Wurmser’s brother-in-law, resigned from the party, and were attacked by
L’Humanité
on 16 December as ‘traitors’. For
Les Lettres françaises,
however, which was trying to appeal against the verdict in the Kravchenko case, this decision by two of their witnesses was embarrassing.

Sartre’s rift with Camus had also widened. After Camus returned to France from South America, his play
Les Justes
appeared in December 1949 at the Théâtre Hébertot, where his
Caligula
had proved such a great success in 1945.
Les Justes,
which dealt with revolutionary violence in tsarist Russia, marked a further step away from his
communisant
contemporaries. Some saw the play as a veiled attack on the Resistance, but Camus’s target was clear: the idea that revolutionary violence could be justified by the vague promise of a better future. The next step away from Sartre was his essay ‘The Rebel’, which came out two years later. It constituted a direct attack on intellectuals who allowed political considerations to corrupt their artistic integrity.

Sartre did not believe that a writer could ever stand aside politically. In his case, political commitment was already subordinating art. He was patronizing about Camus’s scruples and refusal to swim with the progressive tide of history. ‘I only see one solution for you,’ he concluded, ‘the Galapagos Islands.’

The final break did not come until 1952. Sartre saw Camus in the bar of the Hotel Pont-Royal and warned him to expect a savage review of ‘The Rebel’ by Francis Jeanson in
Les Temps modernes
. The editorial committee had refused to censor what had been written.

Camus replied to the article on 30 June. Ignoring Jeanson, he addressed his letter to Sartre – as ‘Monsieur le Directeur’. In particular, he attacked ‘the intellectual method and attitude’ of the piece. His arguments may have lacked philosophical rigour, but he posed enough well-directed questions to render his opponents very uncomfortable. ‘One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.’ He pointed out the fundamental contradiction of existentialists justifying a system which was totally opposed to the idea of the responsibility of the individual.