Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

bonhomie’.
    The main banquet in the Kremlin, with its conspicuous display of luxury, was not a cheerful occasion. There were some forty Russian officials, the French delegation, the British chargé d’affaires and Averell Harriman, the American ambassador. Stalin proposed endless toasts, first of all complimentary ones to his guests, followed by some thirty more to his Russian subordinates – Molotov, Beria, Bulganin, Voroshilov and on down the hierarchy.
    Each time he raised his glass at the end of his little speech, he said, ‘Come!’, and the designated recipient of the honour had to hurry round the table to clink his glass with Stalin’s. The rest of the company sat in frozen silence. The Marshal’s voice was disconcertingly soft as he raised his glass to the chief of the Soviet air staff, then threatened him in a brutal display of hangman’s humour.
    At one point that evening, Stalin turned to Gaston Palewski and said with a malicious smirk, no doubt because the French delegation had ducked the question of recognizing his puppet government for Poland: ‘One never ceases to be Polish, Monsieur Palewski.’
    One of the main objectives of de Gaulle’s journey was to revive the traditional Franco-Russian alliance against Germany – his sense of history never let himforget that Russia had saved France in 1914 – but equally important, he wanted an alliance with Stalin as a counterbalance to Roosevelt and Churchill. He also needed to make sure that the French Communist Party behaved itself.
    De Gaulle’s sense of injustice at the hands of Roosevelt and Churchill should not be underestimated. His outrage at the lack of consultation had been so intense in 1942 that he had even considered breaking off all relations with them. In London, he had requested the ubiquitous ambassador, Bogomolov, to discover the conditions that Stalin might impose in return for recognizing the Free French. In early 1943, a Free French fighter group went to Russia to fly in support of the Red Army, and distinguished itself as the ‘Normandie-Niemen’ regiment. A number of its aviators, although Gaullists rather than Communists, were made Heroes of the Soviet Union.
    De Gaulle clearly had far fewer illusions about Stalin than did Churchill and Anthony Eden, who showed an astonishing readiness to believe in his good faith. Yet from the beginning, de Gaulle had shown a restraint towards the Soviet Union which he had seldom demonstrated towards his Anglo-Saxon allies. He had never openly criticized Stalin, the French Communists or even the Nazi–Soviet pact. De Gaulle had a good reason for keeping quiet on this last point.
    Stalin despised the French. The fall of France in 1940 had undermined the major purpose of his pact with Hitler. He had hoped for a prolonged war of attrition in the west between Nazi Germany and the capitalist democracies. But Marshal Pétain’s armistice had allowed Hitler to turn on the Soviet Union with undiminished strength and increased mobility, thanks to the mass of French army transport captured. One of the German army divisions which reached Stalingrad had started the invasion of the Soviet Union almost entirely equipped with French motor transport. At the Teheran conference in 1943 Stalin declared: ‘France must pay for her criminal collaboration with Germany.’
    Stalin was much more suspicious of the Americans and the British. Eisenhower’s deal with Admiral Darlan in 1942 so convinced him that the British and the Americans would come to some sort of compromise with Germany that Roosevelt and Churchill were forced to reassure him with a declaration that they would accept only unconditional surrender. Stalin still did not believe them. De Gaulle’s view, on the other hand, that Germany should be split into tiny states and deprived of its industrial capacity, showed no sign of wavering. He thus offered the only thing of possible interest to Stalin: a wild card within the Western alliance.
    Stalin eventually got round to the subject of Maurice Thorez, who had just returned to France. The Soviet dictator must have appreciated the subtlety of de Gaulle’s move to create an invisible link between Thorez’s return and the disbandment of the Patriotic Militias. But de Gaulle did not hide his irritation when Stalin tactlessly brought up the subject of Thorez directly. ‘Don’t take my indiscretion amiss,’ he told de Gaulle in a confidential tone. ‘I want only to say that I know Thorez and that,