Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [179]
The Kremlin already had its eye on the ‘Trotskyist and provocateur’ Rousset. The French Communist Party underlined the danger of Sartre’s contribution. ‘There are two ideological dangers in France,’ Georges Soria told Kamenov, his interlocutor in the Kremlin. ‘The first is the militant fascismof Malraux with his false heroism – the ideology of Gaullism – and the second is the philosophy of decadence expounded by Sartre which now acts openly against Communism by talking of a “Third Force”. Both have their followers and an influence, especially among the young.’
It was Andrei Zhdanov who masterminded the attacks on Sartre and his ‘bourgeois reactionary philosophy’. The most vicious campaign was triggered by Sartre’s play Dirty Hands, which opened in April 1948. The play depicts brutal power politics within the Communist Party of a Balkan country during the war as the Red Army advances upon it. Sartre argues from both sides of the fence with clever dialogue, and although his characters lack psychological depth, they are at least intellectual rather than political pawns. His seemingly improbable choice of Jean Cocteau to take over as director proved a good decision. The production and the acting were powerful.
Anybody in touch with reality would have known that the Communists would be infuriated by this chilling portrait of party life; yet Sartre, as David Rousset observed, ‘lived in a bubble’. French Communists were even more furious, because Hoederer, the Communist leader assassinated by his party in the play, had been following a similar line to that of Maurice Thorez during the war. Ilya Ehrenberg told Sartre that he had nothing but contempt for him. Sartre might shrug this off, but he seems to have been genuinely dismayed when the play was used as anti-Communist propaganda. The Kremlin had Dirty Hands suppressed in Finland on the grounds that propaganda hostile to the Soviet Union was against the provisions of their peace treaty. But within five years, Sartre’s own position had changed to such an extent that he would consent to productions of the play only with the agreement of the local Communist Party, which of course meant suppressing it entirely.
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Stalinist hatred for Sartre burst forth in an astonishing piece of stage-management in August 1948, during the Congress of Intellectuals for World Peace at Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in Soviet-occupied Poland.
Some 500 participants were invited from forty-five countries to this typical Communist-front event, organized by Andrei Zhdanov two months after the Soviet blockade of Berlin commenced. The congress’s main objective was to protest at the American and British plan to rebuild Germany, claiming that it was a plot to make it a base once more for aggression against the popular democracies and the Soviet Union. The choice of Poland as the venue was deliberate.
The French delegation included the painters Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, and the writers Vercors, Roger Vailland, Jean Kanapa, Pierre Daix and Paul Éluard, still mourning the death of his wife, Nusch. Laurent Casanova was their organizer and chaperon. The British delegation was more mixed, with the historian A. J. P. Taylor, the scientist J. B. S. Haldane, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury Dr Hewlett-Johnson, and the young George Weidenfeld. The Russian delegation included Alexander Fadeyev, president of the Union of Soviet Writers, the ubiquitous Ilya Ehrenberg, and Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of And Quiet Flows the Don. Jorge Amado came from Brazil and George Lukacs from Hungary. The joint presidents were Julian Huxley, the Director-General of UNESCO, who was neutral, and Irène Joliot-Curie, who was a Communist.
On arrival, the delegates were greeted by lavish yet unenjoyable entertainment amid the ruins. The Poles received Picasso like