Коллектив авторов – Очерки истории Франции XX–XXI веков. Статьи Н. Н. Наумовой и ее учеников (страница 22)

This form of indirect influence – and, no doubt, the situation in France produced results within a week. On 28 October – the same day as the decree dissolving the militias in France – de Gaulle wired Roger Garreau, France’s ambassador in Moscow, to say that ‘The government has decided to quash the verdicts of French courts-martial reached before 18 June 1940 and relating to persons who subsequently took part in the national Resistance movement. This decision gives M. Maurice Thorez the right of re-entry into France. You may inform him of it. However, before a visa can be delivered a few days’ wait will be necessary until the decree is published in the Journal Officiel.’[352]

During this wait, on 19 November, Thorez had a long conversation with Stalin. The length of their meeting, the detail of Stalin’s instructions on how the Communists were to behave in liberated France, and the presence of both Molotov and Lavrenti Beria all indicate the extreme importance placed in Moscow on the PCF’s activities – as well as the strengths and limitations of Stalin’s view of French politics under the GPRF.[353]For Stalin, ‘the most import ant question was how to get through the current difficult period when the Communists were not masters in France, and counted enemies as well as friends; and how to rally their own forces while preventing the forces of reaction from rallying theirs.’ Stalin punctuated the conversation with questions to Thorez, whose answers he used as the basis for his own orders. At first, he simply asked Thorez how he viewed the French situation, while expressing revealing perplexity that former prisoners of war (such as Bidault or Juin) had been given important posts in the GPRF. Thorez’s answer focused on the PCF’s relations with the French Socialists, and noted the SFIO leadership’s refusal to co-operate with the PCF despite the Communists’ success in winning working-class Socialists to their cause and despite Socialist commitments to ‘unity of action’. The Socialists, complained Thorez, were denigrating the PCF’s war record by suggesting that their heroic role in the struggle against the Germans dated only from 1941.

Stalin’s reply broached the central theme of his advice to Thorez by stressing the PCF’s continuing need for allies against the ‘forces of reaction’ and warning against excessive criticism of the SFIO. De Gaulle, Stalin argued, might well try to isolate the PCF and to act against the Communists; even if personally unwilling, ‘he will be pressed to do so by the Americans and the British, who want to create a reactionary government in France, as they do everywhere they can’. The Communists, he stressed, ‘are not strong enough to take on the struggle against the reactionary forces on their own’, and should therefore seek allies among Radicals, Socialists and ‘other elements’ to form a ‘bloc against the forces of reaction’, allowing the PCF to ‘defend itself now and, when the situation had changed, to go onto the attack’. For that reason, they ‘should not seek to identify who, among the Socialists, said what and when against the Soviet Union’. Even if ‘we know the Socialists well’ as ‘the left wing of the bourgeoisie’, the overriding need now was to avoid the PCF’s isolation. The bloc should also create close but discreet links with trade unions and with youth movements. ‘The youth movement’, added Stalin, ‘should not be called the Communist youth. Some people are frightened of flags, and this should be taken into consideration.’

Perhaps the most remarkable moment in the conversation came when Thorez mentioned that ‘the patriotic militias that had formed the main force of the Resistance under the Occupation’ had, for the moment, kept their arms. In reply, Stalin warned Thorez to: take account of the fact that there now existed in France a government recognised by the Allied powers. In these conditions it was difficult for the Communists to have their own armed forces alongside those of the regular army, as their need for such detachments was now open to question. As long as there was no Provisional Government, and as long as no zones to the rear of the battle-front fell under the authority of such a government, there was some point in the existence of such units. But what was their use now that there was a government with an army? Such arguments could be used by the Communists’ enemies, and would seem convincing to the average Frenchman. The position of the Communist Party was therefore weak and would continue to be so as long as it kept its armed forces; its position was simply hard to defend. That was why the armed units needed to be transformed into a more political organisation; as for the weapons, they should be hidden.’[354]

Stalin added that he had mentioned this point because he felt the PCF had not understood how the situation in France had changed, and accused them of pursuing their old policies, notably in attacking the Socialists and trying to hold on to their weapons, oblivious of the new context in which de Gaulle headed a government recognised by Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other powers. Because the PCF was not strong enough to ‘strike at the head’ of this government, it would need to change strategy, gather its forces, and seek allies so as to be able to claim, in the event of an offensive from reactionary forces, that it was not just the Communists who were under attack, but the whole people. Such allies would also be of use if the situation allowed the Communists to go onto the offensive. To attract them, the PCF needed a broad platform including industrial reconstruction, jobs for the unemployed, the defence of democracy, and punishment for the Vichyites who had acted to suppress it.

Stalin returned again and again to the need for the PCF to be both strong in itself and, crucially, to be surrounded by allies, to thwart its enemies’ attempts to isolate it. He was equally cautious on foreign policy issues, and advised against the French Communists’ adopting the dismemberment of Germany as a slogan, at least unless public opinion and the French intelligentsia clearly favoured it. Outwardly at least, Stalin justified his caution in relation to domestic politics: advocating such a policy without a broad supportive consensus could place the PCF ‘in the same camp as the worst reactionaries’, and in danger of condemnation by association. Hence the need to take careful soundings before moving in this direction. It might be added in passing that the Soviets themselves, while wanting the Oder-Neisse line, had no wish for a divided Germany, and gave rather little support to the GPRF’s positions on this point.

The relationship between the two men was clearly indicated by the close of their conversation. Asked if he had any further questions, Thorez replied in the negative but assured Stalin that he ‘would always need his advice’. Returning to Paris, Thorez immediately called on the French to unite their forces for victory and to ‘struggle for a free, democratic and independent France’. By the end of January 1945, he had become the clear and effective advocate of the disbanding of the militias in accordance with the GPRF decree, and of the subordination of the CDLs to the GPRF.[355]

Thorez had received a brief mention during de Gaulle’s visit to Moscow, when Stalin recommended him to the General as ‘a good Frenchman’, adding ‘In your place, I would not put him in prison… at least, not right away!’[356]But Thorez’s return to Paris on 27 November, and the orders Stalin had given him, proved in many ways more significant than the Franco-Soviet alliance. Stalin had ensured that the PCF would be led by his own hand-picked chief; and for the moment at least, France’s Communists would work within the ‘bourgeois’ political system. The importance of this was not lost on de Gaulle, On Thorez’s death in 1964, he wrote to the Communist leader’s son that ‘whatever he may have done before and after, Maurice Thorez answered my call and, as a member of my government, contributed to the maintenance of national unity’.[357]

Throughout the existence of the GPRF, France’s Communists did their utmost to implement Stalin’s directives of November 1944. They remained within government in order, as they said, to ‘bring the war to a victorious conclusion’ and to ensure ‘the co-operation of all the patriotic forces towards France’s democratic renaissance’. On one level, they were extremely successful. The PCI established itself as France’s premier political party, heading the poll at two out of the three national elections (of October 1945 and June and November 1946) with over a quarter of the vote – ahead of their Socialist rivals and over 10 points above their own best pre-war result of March 1936. Progress at the ballot-box was paralleled by an explosion in membership. Out of a pre-war total of some 300,000, the PCF had counted barely 5,000 members in the winter of 1939-40. Their numbers had risen to 60,000 by August 1944, to over 200,000 the following month, and to nearly 544,000 by April 1945; they would exceed 785,000 by the year’s end.[358]This was, to a degree, part of a wider international movement. The prestige of the USSR, as the country which had made the greatest sacrifices to defeat Nazi Germany, was at its peak.[359]Communist ideas had won widespread popularity, not least because state control and egalitarianism were readily associated with the wartime mobilisation which had secured victory. In nine countries of Western Europe, including Italy, Belgium, Finland and France, as well as in four Latin American countries, Communists were in government. And in central, eastern, and south– eastern Europe the Communists had won power on the heels of the Red Army. Within France, meanwhile, the influence of the Resistance and of the democratic and antifascist forces linked to it were at their height; the PCF, as one of the principal forces of the Resistance, could not but reap the benefits. Its leading role within the main trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), itself experiencing a membership boom (with close to four million members), also helped the party put down deep roots in French society.