Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [180]
Zhdanov had instructed the speaker carefully. Fadeyev, whose most recent novel, The Young Guard, had been severely criticized for not having exalted the role of the party, was desperate to clear his name. He demanded open war against the decadence of Western literature and art. Picasso was not mentioned by name, but the thrust of the attack was clear. Only painters of socialist realism could be accepted as aligned with the working class. But when Fadeyev described Sartre as a ‘jackal with a pen’, delegates from the West instinctively snatched off their headphones in disbelief. Ignoring the effect in the hall, Fadeyev simply went on reading his text.
Despite the watchful eye of Laurent Casanova, several members of the French delegation – Picasso, Léger and Vercors – did not hide their disgust. For Vercors it was a major blow to his faith. He would turn against the party before the end of the following year and prove a formidable critic of the show trials in Eastern Europe. Julian Huxley, after a brief exchange of notes with his co-president, Irène Joliot-Curie, left the hall and took the next flight home.
That evening in the bar of the Monopol Hotel, Picasso became drunk, exasperated by arguments with Russian socialist-realist painters. Journalists kept asking him what he thought of the congress, but he refused to answer.
On the last day of the congress, delegates were shocked by news of the unexpected death of Zhdanov. For Fadeyev especially, it was a devastating blow. The journalist Dominique Desanti saw Fadeyev’s hands shake after he received the news. He must have assumed that his controller had been liquidated on Stalin’s orders – the circumstances of Zhdanov’s death are still uncertain – and feared that he would follow him. Fadeyev, who had sold his soul to the system, committed suicide after Khrushchev’s revelation of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress. His self-destruction was a harshly appropriate ending to a tale of those times.
After the congress, Picasso, Éluard and Daix were taken by the Polish Communist Party on a visit to Auschwitz and then to Warsaw, where they stood, Picasso in tears, on the crushed rubble of what had been the ghetto. Nazi atrocities still formed one of the strongest themes in Stalinist propaganda – only the Soviet Union, it was claimed, could prevent the recurrence of such crimes.
The French Communist Party, however, found itself pushed into ever more indefensible positions as the era of Eastern European show trials began. Every negative was turned into a positive. The bigger the lie, the greater the leap of faith, and the more desperately would loyal party members defend it. Their rationale was based on one of the most shameless manipulations of logic ever known. Comrade Stalin and Communist parties everywhere were fighting for the good of the people. They were therefore incapable of torturing a loyal Communist to force him to confess to appalling crimes.
The greatest challenge to the reputation of the Soviet Union came early in 1949 with the Kravchenko court case in Paris, an event which was followed with obsessive interest all round the world.
Viktor Kravchenko, a Russian engineer who had defected from a Soviet trade mission in the United States in 1944, published his memoirs, I Chose Freedom. The book became one of the great bestsellers of the post-war period and was translated into twenty-two languages. It was the first widely published account by a Russian eyewitness of Stalin’s forced collectivizations, the persecution of the kulaks and the famine in the Ukraine; it also gave a clear idea of the Soviet labour camps twenty-five years before Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.