Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

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 royalty and put him in the bedroom which Hitler had used during the war. Once the congress started, Picasso made his first political address, calling for the release of his friend Pablo Neruda, who was imprisoned in Chile. His speech did not last long and its simplicity had a powerful effect. He was followed to the rostrum by Alexander Fadeyev; the contrast could not have been greater.
    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 alignedwith 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 mostshameless 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