Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [175]
Kohler knew that Stalin’s fear of Germany was entirely visceral. His declaration in 1943 at the Teheran conference that it would be necessary to execute between 50,000 and 100,000 senior German officers was not merely a turn of phrase to impress his audience. And the Soviet leadership’s paranoia, caused by the Americans’ haste to change the Statute of Occupation, was entirely in character. Stalin had been traumatized by the German invasion of Russia mainly because he had so disastrously underestimated the threat of invasion.
It is worth transcribing Kohler’s telegramin full.
To: Secretary of State No: 2325, October 14, 5 p.m.
As seen from Moscow, current Communist-directed disturbances in France seemlikely to be deliberately calculated to hasten the advent to power of de Gaulle, with primary objective of thus bringing about the destruction of the London decisions and disrupting the dangerous (to Kremlin) unity of Western Powers. Soviet leaders clearly demonstrated during the Moscow talks that restoration of western Germany is their main present concern and at same time learned there was no chance of preventing such restoration by negotiation, even at the price of concessions with respect to Berlin. In view his clearly-expressed views, de Gaulle would apparently be second-best only to a Communist government in France in bringing about these Soviet objectives and French Communists who suffer at his hands are clearly ‘expendable’.
In Moscow, two days before the events in Grenoble, Georges Soria of the French Communist Party had told Kamenov that ‘in the present situation, the tasks of the French Communist Party are very complicated and difficult. At one meeting Thorez warned that a tenacious struggle will take place and that this conflict could even be armed.’ The statement can, of course, be read in different ways. But the general content, and the complicated and difficult tasks unspecified by Thorez, are compatible with the Kohler analysis.
The French Communist Party may have been the ‘eldest son of the Stalinist church’, but Stalin was hardly the man to shrink from playing Abraham. He knew that if the Gaullists had come to power – a prospect which seemed more likely at the time than it does in hindsight – they would have suppressed the Communist Party. Their plans for the rounding up of Communists were an open secret. Colonel Rémy later confirmed to Ridgway Knight that ‘the arrest of 500 Communists would decapitate and paralyze the movement, and the RPF knew exactly where these 500 men were’. Colonel Passy told American diplomats that the General should start by shooting several hundred people, but ‘unhappily he hasn’t got the stomach for it’.
The Kohler hypothesis, if true, prompts a number of thoughts. Stalin had almost certainly misjudged de Gaulle. However much de Gaulle loathed the deal on Germany or despised politicians, he would have considered seizing power illegally only if the government had looked like caving in to the Communists or to a Soviet ultimatum. Civil unrest, even with attacks on the Rassemblement, was not enough.
The political crisis in Paris, which had lasted most of the summer, with one politician after another failing to form a government, only came to an end on 11 September. Dr Henri Queuille of the Radicals, a country doctor famous for his lack of panache, finally succeeded. Queuille immediately reinstated Moch as Minister of the Interior.
The Communist Party’s efforts that autumn were directed once again through the CGT, and once again genuine grievances were exploited for political ends. Moch and other members of the government desperately wanted to reduce food prices, but the economic situation did not yet permit it. On 17 October, the franc had to be devalued by 17 per cent.
From 8 October, railway strikes spread.