Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [181]
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,