Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941-1947

by Alfred J. Rieber

This study analyzes the relationship, during the war against Hitler and the immediate postwar years, between official Soviet policy and the activities and the statements of a Communist party outside the area controlled by the Soviet Union. The
French Communist Party, one of the largest and most active Communist Parties in western Europe, won a strong position within France by its sacrifices first in the Resistance and then in the national effort of reconstruction. It failed, however, to use its position to advance either its own interests or those of the Soviet Union. Professor Rieber's book throws light both on the causes of the French Communists' failure and on the strategy and tactics of Soviet foreign policy during a crucial period of history.

The story is carried from the day Stalin called for a united front of peoples against Fascism - making it possible to be at once a patriotic Frenchman and a militant Communist - to the day when the French Communists immediately after the founding of the Cominform, adopted a resolution which rejected collaboration with the Socialists and cooperation among the great powers. It shows the French Communists maintaining their allegiance to the Soviet brand of revolutionary Marxism and using every political means to prepare the way for revolution; it also shows how their support of the twists and turns of Soviet policy helped frustrate their aims within France.

Sources for this book include unusual interviews with high-ranking French officials, former members of the French Communist Party, and Resistance leaders; as well as unpublished, official material on Communist activities in France, recently published Soviet diplomatic documents on relations with France, material from Soviet periodicals not available in the West, and unpublished, unofficial archival material on the Communist penetration of the Resistance movement.

Alfred J. Rieber is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

395 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1962

About the author

Alfred J. Rieber has been teaching and writing Russian and Soviet history for more than fifty years. He was a participant in the first year of the Soviet-American cultural exchange in 1958-59 and has returned to the Soviet Union and Russia many times to lecture and conduct archival research. He began teaching at Northwestern and then moved to the University of Pennsylvania where he taught for twenty–five years and chaired the History Department for ten years, now holding the title of Professor Emeritus. For the past twenty-two years he has taught at Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary where he was also chair of the History Department for four years, and upon retirement was elected by the university Senate as University Professor Emeritus. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. In 1966 he was awarded the E. Harris Harbison Prize of the Danforth Foundation as one of the ten best teachers in the U.S. He has won additional teaching awards at Penn and CEU where he was elected professor of the year by the entire student body in 1997 and 1998. The American Philosophical Society awarded him the Henry C. Moe Prize in 1985.