Why the Boss Bowed His Head

Maurice Thorez bent his bull neck and buried his head in his hands. In the town hall of Gentilly, near Paris, he was presiding over a meeting of the French Communist Party's Central Committee. He was presiding, but the man in charge was a former schoolteacher, handsome 41-year-old Etienne Fajon. And, in front of all the comrades, Fajon was giving him a polite but painful roasting.

Teacher Fajon could lecture Boss Thorez because Thorez, unlike Tito, had no army, no secret police that would protect him in defiance of the Cominform. Fajon, permanent representative of the French party on the Cominform, was just back from Bucharest. He bore a letter from Cominform Boss Andrei Zhdanov to Thorez. The Cominform message rebuked Thorez secretly for the same view of nationalism which had drawn the public thunderbolt of Cominform anathema to Tito's head. Zhdanov said that Thorez had not stuck close enough "to the basic and permanent principles of proletarian internationalism." As was clear from the rest of the letter, this Communist gobbledygook meant that Thorez was deemed guilty of substituting a modicum of French nationalism for 100% subservience to Russian nationalism, as interpreted by the Kremlin bosses.

How to Be Saved. Zhdanov's letter went on to dictate to the French Communist Party a new line based on the following three points: 1) a blinder reliance on the Soviet Union, and a greater propaganda campaign to justify the role of the Soviet Union before & after the war; 2) a greater willingness on the part of the French party leadership to accept criticism from within the French Central Committee, or from other Communist parties; 3) greater emphasis on the fact that the only real form of national independence is total dependence on the Soviet Union.

Fajon, who lines up with, old Andre Marty and young Laurent ("Moscow's Eye") Casanova in opposition to Thorez, told the latter off, politely, at Gentilly. Making the first policy speech of the Central Committee meeting, Fajon said: "There is no such thing as national independence except when efforts toward that end repose on the might of the Soviet Union . . . Maurice Thorez was right when he said, months ago, that our rallying call should be national independence. But we must repeat that one of the major conditions of this independence is ... the cohesion of international Communist parties."

How to Learn Too Well. Thorez had fallen this far--to the point where he could be sarcastically complimented by a party upstart--because he had learned the Moscow lesson too thoroughly. Of all the French leaders, he had the closest experience of Kremlin policy during World War II. He had been in Moscow when Stalin & Co. abandoned all but a vestige of Marxism in their propaganda and rallied the Russian people with outright Russian nationalism. Thorez, an apt pupil, tried the same line in France, with considerable political success. But the Kremlin views Communist nationalism as an unexportable commodity. It can be used only by the Kremlin bosses--and only in Russia.

No one wasted any pity for Maurice Thorez. It was not principle, patriotic or otherwise, that brought him to humiliation at Gentilly. He had simply seen the patriotic appeal as a more effective instrument to power. Like nearly all surviving Communist leaders, Thorez cares nothing for principle or ideology. He told a friend recently: "Show me the correct thing to do [Montrez-moi ce qu'il faut faire] and we will fit it into the theory afterwards."

The "correct thing," the smart maneuver, turned out to be wrong, according to Zhdanov. So Maurice Thorez sat penitent last week at Gentilly while the very banners above his head rebuked him with slogans stressing the new Communist line.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.