Stalin, Dimitrov and the cult of the individual

Kevin MorganUniversity of Manchester

Kevin Morgan is Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Manchester and a founding editor of the journal Twentieth Century Communism. His recent publications include the three volumes of Bolshevism and the British Left (Lawrence and Wishart, 2006-13) and Communists in British Society 1920-91 (Rivers Oram, 2007). His International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: leaders, tribunes and martyrs under Lenin and Stalin will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.

Please send the published issue to:

Kevin MorganSchool of Social Sciences (Politics)Arthur Lewis BuildingUniversity of Manchester M13 9PLUK

AbstractThis paper considers the stalinist cult of the individual in its transnational aspect as represented in the figures of Stalin and the Bulgarian Dimitrov. Focusing on the 1930s, it argues that it was not so much the Stalin cult itself which at this stage was generalised through the Comintern, but the wider turn to the heroic within which the cult must be located. Variations in the incidence and character of cultic types and practices are evaluated using the heuristic devices of the integrating and enkindling figure. Using materials from France and Britain, the paper concludes that it was in the Cold War phase of ‘high stalinism’ that a fully stalinised hierarchical system of cults was established on an international scale.

Keywords: Stalinism – Stalinisation – Comintern – Personality Cult – Anti-Fascism.

If stalinism conjures up any image in the popular imagination, it is that of the cult of the individual.1 Already prefigured by the posthumous Lenin cult, the lifting of Stalin to an eminence high above his peers can be traced as early as his fiftieth birthday in December 1929, when it served as both corollary and demonstration of the vanquishing or physical banishment of his foremost rivals. Though for a few years thereafter the Stalin cult fell rather 1 Some of the arguments presented in this paper are more fully developed in my International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: leaders, tribunes and martyrs under Lenin and Stalin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2016). Research was carried out with the support of a research fellowship awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/J005975/1).

1

into abeyance, from the latter months of 1933 until the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death it became established as one of the key defining features of the stalinist political order. As with the terror with which it was so closely associated, the public veneration of Stalin had been subject to further marked fluctuations over time. Nevertheless, it was not until its repudiation by his successor Khrushchev in 1956 that Stalin’s cult was, at least in theory, terminated at the moment of its first being acknowledged.2 In very approximate terms, it began with stalinisation, ended with destalinisation, and was synonymous with what came in between.

Historians have had very different views as to the motivations and political rationale that lay behind the practices of cult-building. Some, notably Robert C. Tucker, have traced the primary responsibility to Stalin’s own personal cravings and neuroses.3 This was also the basic tenor of the Khrushchev speech, as an exercise in limitation and dissociation, and in the authorised Comintern history of the Brezhnev years there appeared the still more restrictive formulation of the ‘cult of the Stalin personality’. Whether or not Stalin is viewed, as Tucker puts it, as the phenomenon’s ‘master-builder’, it is nevertheless beyond dispute that its further development went far beyond his personal aggrandisement and culminated instead in a pyramidal cultic hierarchy that symbolised the centralisation of political and intellectual authority within the world of communism. Historians of the USSR invoke the phenomenon of ‘mini-Stalins’ with their own particular power base, like the lower units of the party. Tucker himself referred to the ‘surrogate-Stalins’ who bore their leader’s authority in their own particular field of activity. This, moreover, was not confined to the USSR itself, and the emergence elsewhere of these surrogate-Stalins was to become one of the most conspicuous distinguishing features of the communist movement internationally. Already in the 1930s, Franz Borkenau wrote in his pioneering Comintern history of leaders of this type wielding ‘absolute power’ within their parties, and of the ‘worship of the leader-superman’ that linked the communist parties with fascism.4 By 1956, the Polish communist Wladyslaw Gomulka, lately reinstated as his party’s first secretary, could refer in retrospect to a definite cultic system in which those beneath Stalin also ‘donned the robes of infallibility’, but with a merely reflective brilliance like the moon’s.5

Surprisingly, there appears to have been no attempt to date to write a transnational history of this phenomenon. On the Soviet cults of Lenin and Stalin, there does now exist an extensive literature offering indispensable insights. In some of these readings, the cults are described in terms of specifically Russian contingencies and cultural structures.6 In others, they are linked

2 For the more complex realities of developments following Stalin’s death, see Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: rethinking the stalinist past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 3 Robert C. Tucker, “The rise of Stalin’s personality cult”, American Historical Review, 84 (1979), p. 347-366.4 Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (London: Faber & Faber, 1938), p. 394.5 Cited Mancin Zaremba, “The second step of a ladder: the cult of the first secretaries in Poland” in Balázs Apor et al (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern bloc (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 262-263.6 Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); J. Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism. Bolsheviks, boyars and the persistence of tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For alternative readings of the Lenin cult, see also Olga Velikanova, Making of an Idol. On uses of Lenin (Göttingen: Muster-Schmidt, 1996); Benno Ennker, Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der

2

with a notion of the modern personality cult as conditional upon the ‘closed’ society and most frequently linked with comparators of the authoritarian right.7 What is common to both approaches is that communism as an international movement barely figures. Recognition of an explicitly transnational dimension has focused principally on the sovietisation of the post-war people’s democracies, and an extended cult community that is still confined within the physical limits of Stalin’s dominions.8 Interestingly, it is in the case of the later Mao cult that the international aspect is most clearly registered, and a global history has been presented of the Little Red Book which apparently has no parallel in writings on the key political texts of the Stalin period.9 Studies do exist of individual cult figures, and in 2009 there was a collation of such materials in the inaugural issue of the journal Twentieth Century Communism. Nevertheless, it is only in France, where stalinist norms were adopted as perhaps nowhere else by an oppositional communist party, that the interconnections between the cults of Stalin himself and the surrogate-Stalin that was Maurice Thorez have been explored in any depth in both a critical scholarly literature and more popular accounts.10

This paper derives from the attempt to write a history of the cult phenomenon within the international communist movement in the years before 1956. Superficially, this may appear as a mere extension or reverberation of existing sovietisation narratives to those parties that never reached the point of actually exercising state power. As Yves Cohen puts it in his book Le Siècle des chefs, words and images travelled beyond the physical frontiers of Soviet power, and the vesting of political hopes in the USSR owed a good deal to their incarnation in the figure of the leader.11 The contention of this paper is that this nevertheless represented only one aspect of a complex phenomenon that was also deeply rooted in the culture of the European left.

Certainly, this wider cult phenomenon represented the internationalisation of practices originating in the USSR, and following a periodisation reflecting the two principal phases of Soviet cult-building. The first of these, culminating in Stalin’s sixtieth birthday in 1939, marked the consolidation of the dictator’s hold on power, with a first peak of activity coinciding on the one hand with the launching of the terror and on the other with the pseudo-democratic contrivance of the so-called Stalin constitution. The second, following something of a hiatus in cult activity during the Great Patriotic War, coincided with the onset of the Cold

Sowjetunion (Köln: Bohlau, 1997).7 Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (dir.), Personality Cults in Stalinism – Personenkulte im Stalinismus (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2004); Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult. A study in the alchemies of power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012).8 Balázs Apor et al (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships, op. cit.(cf. note 5).9 Daniel Leese, Mao Cult. Rhetoric and ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Alexander C. Cook (ed.), Mao’s Little Red Book. A global history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).10 See notably Annie Kriegel, « Bureaucratie, culte de personnalité et charisme. Le cas français: Maurice Thorez, secrétaire général du PCF (1900-1964) » in idem, Communisme au miroir français, Paris, Gallimard, 1974, p. 132-158; Bernard Pudal, Prendre parti. Pour une sociologie historique du PCF, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1989; Jean-Marie Goulemot, Pour l’amour de Staline. La face oubliée du communisme français, Paris, CNRS, 2009 edn.11 Yves Cohen, Le Siècle des chefs. Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l’autorité (Paris : Éditions Amsterdam, 2013), p. 794.

3

War around 1947 and reached its cultic climax with the international commemoration of Stalin’s seventieth birthday in December 1949. It is in this period that the evidence of the cultic system noted by Gomulka may be found in abundance. Not only did Stalin’s birthday draw tributes and offerings on an international scale that was without historical precedent. It was also followed by the smaller-scale commemorations of national party leaders in France, in Italy and in Britain as well as in the new people’s democracies. Everywhere the communist parties had grown in stature, ran one of the Stalin tributes published in France: ‘everywhere have shot up the likes of Thorez and Duclos, Togliatti, Markos, Carlos Prestes, Mao-Tse Tung, Gottwald and William Foster [...] Wherever a communist party or central committee is at work, Stalin is alive.’12

In respect of the Soviet cult of Stalin, there was a basic continuity of purpose or effect between the first phase of cult-building and the second. This effect is best described as that of the integrating cult. Meeting with the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger in 1937, Stalin had affected helplessness and irritation in the face of the popular worship of his person: ‘of course that’s wrong, what can one person do – they see in me a unifying concept, and create foolish raptures around me’.13 It was to just this unifying concept that well-disposed observers in the West ascribed the cult. According to the Webbs in their Soviet Communism, it represented the ‘deliberate exploitation by the governing junta [...] of the traditional reverence of the Russian people for a personal autocrat’. Georges Friedmann meanwhile wrote of how the grouping of a vast and heterogeneous population could not be achieved around an abstract idea or even a regime, but demanded a ‘concrete, living figure’ whom one could name, see, and relate emotionally to precisely as an individual.14

With the global advance of communism following the Second World War, it is easy to see why the leader cult should once more have flourished both in the satellite states of the East and in the communist movement internationally. This for the communists was a phase of extreme introversion and sectarianism that was perfectly epitomised by the esoteric commemoration of Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Somewhat fortuitously, Stalin’s fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays had also fallen in the embattled political contexts respectively of Class Against Class and of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Politically noxious as they may have been, there was at these times a basic congruence between the esoteric practices of a formalised cultic hierarchy and the turning of communist parties in upon themselves in the fashion of the fortress party. As Alexei Tikhomorov writes of the Cold War period, the ‘formation of an imagined community by making use of the Stalin cult was one of the most overarching projects in the realm of symbolic politics carried out to integrate the disparate elements of the Periphery [...] into a unified political body’.15 The communist movement in effect became its

12 Georges Mounin, « Le marxisme et les grands hommes », Nouvelle Critique, Dec. 1949, p. 17. In the original, Foster is misspelt.13 Cited Sarah Davies, “Stalin and the making of the leader cult in the 1930s” in Balázs Apor et al (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. op. cit.(cf. note 5), p. 37.14 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: a new civilisation (London: Gollancz, 1937 edn), p. 437-8; Georges Friedmann, De la Sainte Russie à l’URSS, Paris, Gallimard, 1938, p.217-218.15 Alexey Tikhomorov, “The Stalin cult between center and periphery: the structures of the cult community in the empire of socialism, 1949-1956 – the case of GDR” in Benno Ennker and Heidi Hein-Kircher (dir.), Der

4

own cult community: and if symbolic borders were thereby drawn with the world of capitalism, as Tikhomorov puts it, these were not confined to socialism’s physical borders but also marked the internal divisions of the Cold War. Both nationally and internationally the cults therefore performed the integrating effect of binding the movement more closely against a world beyond seen primarily as a source of threat and contamination.

The idea of an integrating cult is familiar from writings on other historical examples such as the major fascist cults, or even the ‘cult of royal personality’ seen as a function of the centralising state of an earlier era.16 It is difficult, on the other hand, to see how this could have assisted in connecting with new political constituencies, as the popular-front communist parties of the first phase of cult-building succeeded in doing. Luciano Cavalli has written of the tendency of movements formed around the figure of the leader to shape a ‘closed universe of social relationships which the leader himself (or herself) defines’.17 Though the communist movement of the 1930s did, as Borkenau suggested, begin to gravitate around such cult-like figures, this was not so much a form of drawing together as one of stirring into action through the personalisation of the cause the communists claimed to stand for. There was, in other words, a long tradition within radical movements of the embodiment in the individual, not of some existing state or political order, but of some future ideal to be realised, or else some quality of resistance to established authority. The German social democrat Eduard Bernstein referred to this precisely as a cult of personality (Kultus der Persönlichkeit) in the book he wrote on the pioneering German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. ‘When all is said and done’, Bernstein wrote, ‘most persons like to see a cause, which, the more far-reaching its aims at any given moment, must seem the more abstract, embodied in one individual’. How similar the wording is to Friedmann’s. For Bernstein, nevertheless, Lassalle’s cult had served as a standard inspiring enthusiasm among the masses and ‘enkindled hundreds of thousands to struggle for the rights of labour’.18 It is in this sense of stirring into flames that one may equally conceive of an enkindling cult as well as an integrating one.

The cult of the individual was therefore a matter, not only of different individuals, but of the different symbolic roles which these could be called upon to play according to the disparate conditions in which these were or could be made effective. Just as one may speak of a ‘century of communisms’, communism’s notions of the leader were also constructed according to different temporalities and functionalities as well as specificities of political culture and environment.19 As understood here, the cult of personality or the individual – the Russian phrase used by Khrushchev can be translated either way – was not therefore

Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2010, p. 297-324.16 Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”. Image and reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 edn); Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), ch. 6; Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (Cambridge, Mass.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 198-203.17 Cavalli, “Considerations on charisma and the cult of charismatic leadership”, Modern Italy, 3 (1998), p. 161.18 Eduard Bernstein (trans. Eleanor Marx), Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1893), p. 188-189; also Bernstein, Ferdinand Lassalle. Eine Würdigung des Lehres und Kämpfers, Berlin, Verleft Bein Paul Cassirer, 1919, p. 299.19 For the plural formation, see Michel Dreyfus et al (dir), Le siècle des communismes, Paris : Éditions de l’Atelier, 2000.

5

restricted to any one particular phase or variant of communism’s history, as Khrushchev’s own, politically tendentious usage sought to convey. It is striking in a longer perspective that the principal growth periods of western communism, in the mid-1930s and early-to-mid-1940s, were not only characterised by anti-fascism but by the wider heroisation of communist discourse. Conversely, it was in periods of contraction, retrenchment or consolidation that the Stalin cult itself registered most strongly, culminating in the extravagant rituals of ‘high stalinism’. With the harnessing of a radical symbolic politics to a process of state-building and international realpolitik of the utmost cynicism and brutality, the manufactured adulation of the leader came to serve as the instrument of public conformism and the securing of the cult community against both internal and external contagion.

The discussion that follows focuses on the two living individuals who most of all personified communism internationally in the initial phase of cult-building that preceded the war. One, of course, was Stalin. The other was the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, whom Stalin installed at the head of the Comintern following Dimitrov’s successful defiance of the Nazis at the Reichstag fire trial in the final months of 1933. The first contention here is that it was Dimitrov far more than Stalin who, with the first appearance of the cult of the individual in the 1930s, enjoyed the public veneration of many western communists. He did so, moreover, as an enkindling figure: one that was not, in the first instance, manufactured by the institution, that was represented through a life-history and persona clearly distinguishable from the institution, and whose ascription with some quality of exceptionality did not preclude the advancement of other individuals. There is no doubt that a figure of such standing was impossible to reconcile with the concentration of symbolic authority in the single integrating figure of Stalin himself. By the time of Dimitrov’s death in 1949, it was communism as a global project that was symbolised in the overriding cult of Stalin himself, and the now diminished and delimited figure of Dimitrov performed a manifestly subordinate role within a clear cult hierarchy. Focusing only on the 1930s, this paper shows how already this circumscription of the Dimitrov cult had been accomplished by the end of the decade. Even so, it was his potency as a symbol of anti-fascism that had assisted in legitimising the communists’ wider credentials and mobilising a wider population around their campaigns in a period which for a number of communist parties was one of greatly increased political effectiveness.

From living man to tested pilot

One might begin on the December day in 1936 when what was now the first British company of the International Brigade had its first real military engagement at Córdoba. Among the Britons who died that day, the best known names are those of John Cornford and Ralph Fox. Both were communists; both were writers of exceptional gifts. Cornford, just graduated from Cambridge, epitomised the new generation of student communists; Fox by contrast was a party and Comintern veteran acquainted with every twist and vicissitude of communist policy. But both, it seems, drew inspiration from the new communist figure of the hero; and when they thought of the hero, both thought first of all of Dimitrov.

6

Aged just twenty-one, Cornford was one of the first Britons to go to Spain and had written his well-known poem Full Moon at Tierz just a few weeks before his death:

Three years ago Dimitrov fought aloneAnd we stood taller when he won.But now the Leipzig dragon’s teethSprout strong and handsome against deathAnd here an army fights where there was one.20

Fox, lately the Daily Worker’s literary editor, had worked for some time at Moscow’s Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, and was already well-known as a novelist and biographer as well as political journalist. The last of his books, The Novel and the People, was published only posthumously, and again it was Dimitrov it invoked as exemplar of the hero Fox envisaged for a new type of socialist novel conceived in the spirit of revolutionary romanticism. ‘Few would disagree’, Fox explained, ‘that in our time there is one example of moral grandeur and courage worthy to stand beside the greatest in our human history’. Dimitrov was and would always be ‘the symbol of man’s spirit victorious against man’s enemies’.21

‘Three years ago’ was the moment of Dimitrov’s impromptu transition from the obscurity of a typical Comintern functionary to the full glare of publicity on the international public stage. When the Nazis assumed their grip on power at the beginning of 1933, Dimitrov was head of the CI’s Berlin-based West European Bureau but as a figure working principally undercover was hardly known even to most European communists. When in March he was among those falsely charged with involvement in the burning of the Reichstag, it was as the symbol of a thwarted bolshevik conspiracy supposedly orchestrated from Moscow. Nevertheless, Dimitrov even now ceded precedence to his German co-defendant Ernst Torgler, erstwhile head of the KPD’s parliamentary group, and to the imprisoned German party leader Ernst Thälmann. It was Dimitrov, not Torgler, who nevertheless seized the opportunity to defend himself, and turned the tables on his prosecutors in one of the courtroom sensations of the modern era. The Nazis had determined on the widest publicity as a quasi-show trial, but without the later stalinist device of a prearranged script. The result in propaganda terms was a calamity. Following his acquittal in December 1933 Dimitrov was granted asylum in the USSR and installed by Stalin at the head of the Comintern as arguably its first genuine personality to emerge from beyond the ranks of the Bolsheviks themselves.

The impact made by the Leipzig trial is impossible to understand except in the context of the

virtual collapse of the strongest communist party outside of Russia, and the subjugation of

Europe’s strongest labour movement seemingly without a fight. The politics of personality is

always the work of multiple actors, and the wider resonance of Dimitrov’s coup de théâtre

20 Cornford, “Full moon at Tierz : before the storming of Huesca” in Pat Sloan (ed.), John Cornford. A memoir (London: Cape, 1938), p. 244-246.21 Ralph Fox, The Novel and the People (London: Cobbett Press, 1944 edn), p. 121-124.

7

would have been unthinkable without the international campaigning efforts masterminded by

the German communist Willi Münzenberg. To this extent, this may be regarded as the

projection through some leading individual of the cultures of solidarity with which

Münzenberg had become so closely identified over the previous decade.22 If Dimitrov’s

finest moment was the humbling of the prosecution witness Hermann Göring, it was through

these international agencies that this was represented in the trial’s most famous visual image,

a John Heartfield photomontage that showed Dimitrov towering over a spluttering, Lilliputian

Göring. Nobody living afterwards, the British journalist Claud Cockburn recalled, could

‘possibly have any notion of what Dimitrov was to us in the way of a symbol, a flame in

darkness’.23 Bertolt Brecht, in one of the poems he dedicated to Dimitrov, evoked a figure

who by seizing upon Germany’s one remaining public space spoke also for the thousands

who bravely resisted out of sight.24

Dimitrov himself would describe how denting the myth of fascism’s invincibility had required ‘the example of a living man’ standing up to it.25 In Britain at least, it was the living man who had caught the imagination of an international public. In contrast to the shadowy private life of Stalin, whose wife had the previous year committed suicide, Dimitrov’s more compelling public persona was assisted by the presence of his mother in the courtroom, and of his sister on public platforms. Like Socrates, wrote Fox, ‘he could have claimed to have spent his whole life in preparing for his defence’, and British publishers now competed with one other for the rights to Dimitrov’s autobiography.26 In the USA, the playwright Elmer Rice leant so heavily on the trial proceedings in his topical drama Judgment Day that the play in his own words ‘almost wrote itself’, and ran successfully in London as well as New York.27 The authentically proletarian writer Harold Heslop, not himself a communist, evoked a group of striking miners in his novel Last Cage Down. ‘Could it be possible that so great a miracle of heroism existed?’, they muse. ‘Dimitroff lit up their world and sent that great, hopeful shudder thrilling through their spines, and stimulated anew their love of their own class …They were with him, part of him, one with him. So they stood in silent tribute to a MAN.’28

Sometimes this is referred to as charisma. However, one of the difficulties sometimes associated with charisma is its use to convey some quality or gift inhering in the individual independently of any social process. The concept of spontaneity is open to similar objections.

22 See Kasper Braskén, The International Workers’ Relief, Communism and Transnational Solidarity. Willi Münzenberg in Weimar Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).23 Claud Cockburn, Crossing the Line (London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), p. 54.24 Brecht, “Adresse au camarade Dimitrov qui lutte à Leipzig devant le tribunal fasciste”, Commune, Dec. 1933, p. 410-411. 25 ‘Dimitrov to writers. A speech before the Soviet Writers’ Association’, Left Review, Jun. 1935, p. 343.26 National Archives, London, KV 2 1664, Lovat Dickinson to Dimitrov, 7 Mar. 1934, Victor Gollancz to Dimitrov, 6 Apr. 1934.27 Frank Durham, Elmer Rice (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), p. 95-100.28 Harold Heslop, Last Cage Down (1935) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984 edn), p. 61-62.

8

Nevertheless, its serviceability in the context of the marxist tradition lies in signalling external contingencies that arise independently of the conscious political direction of the marxists themselves. As Philippe Burrin observes, the ascription of charisma in a case like Stalin’s has to begin with the charisma of the party, from which Stalin’s charisma was derived and which, precisely through the cult of the individual, it also usurped.29 Dimitrov at the Leipzig trial also did not set himself apart from his party. On the contrary, he made it clear that he stood there as a communist: one whose highest law, as he put it, was the Comintern programme and highest jurisidiction the Comintern control commission.30 Even so, were it only in fulfilling his communist duty while his co-defendants lapsed in theirs, it was not Dimitrov who derived his kudos from his party, but if anything the reverse. Borkenau was a fervent critic of the Comintern who had himself left the KPD in 1929. It was nevertheless Borkenau who described Dimitrov’s performance at Leipzig as having ‘won back for the communists the prestige they had so conspicuously lost during the preceding years’.31

Dimitrov’s was therefore the first specifically Comintern cult and in many respects a model for those that immediately followed. In particular, it was in the spirit of resistance and if necessary of martyrdom that the sanctity of the communist cause was most of all demonstrated. Immediately following Dimitrov’s release, solidarity efforts turned to Thälmann, as both leader and symbol of Germany’s many thousands of other anti-fascist prisoners. Henri Barbusse in France was among those who conjured up for Thälmann an exemplary life-history which, like Dimitrov’s, was intended both as model and as inspiration.32 Thälmann had been the first major figure outside of Russia to be saluted as his party’s leader, and in German campaigning literature in particular there was the echo of a competitive rivalry with the Hitler cult.33 Nevertheless, the dominant tenor of the Thälmann campaign was to present him as the vehicle of a very different ideal of leadership from that identified with Hitler. Oto Bihalji-Merin was a Yugoslavian communist formerly active in Germany and lately initiator of the Paris-based Institute for the Study of Fascism. Emphasising the contrast with the leadership-principle of fascist regimes, Bihalji-Merin insisted that communist ideals of leadership had nothing in common with the ‘mystical quality of the charismatic summons’ on which this rested. Rather than Borkenau’s ‘leader-superman’ figure, he evoked instead the communist leaders who epitomised their class, which he demonstrated by a whole series of examples who in every case either were or recently had been political prisoners.34 In just the same spirit, a celebratory profile of so-called ‘Comintern people’ focused first of all on Dimitrov, Thälmann and the Hungarian political prisoner Mátyás Rákosi, thus proceeding to a roll-call of such individuals, every one of whom had

29 Burrin cited Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, « Stalinisme, culte ouvrier et culte des dirigeants » in Michel Dreyfus et al (dir.), Le siècle des communismes, op. cit. (cf. note 23), p. 369.30 Dimitrov Accuses the Nazis at the Reichstag Fire Trial (Sydney: Current Book Distributors, 1942), p. 7.31 Franz Borkenau, The Communist International, op. cit. (cf. note 4), p. 405.32 Henri Barbusse, Connais-tu Thaelmann?, Paris, Comité pour la Libération de Thaelmann et des Antifascistes Allemands emprisonnés, n.d. but 1934. 33 See for example Wilhelm Pieck, preface to Thaelmann, Paris, Éditions La Défense, 1934, p. 3-734 Anna Seghers et al, Ernst Thaelmann. What he stands for (London: Workers’ Bookshop, 1934), p. 13-21; also the shorter version, « Chefs de classe. Le rôle du personnage dans l’histoire », Monde, 22 Jun. 1934.

9

been incarcerated, assassinated or tortured.35 Even socialism in power had or claimed its martyrs, and in December 1934 the Leningrad party leader Sergei Kirov was arguably the last such ruling figure to fall, as it seemed, as the victim of the regime’s opponents. There was nevertheless nothing peculiar to Russia about these forms of veneration. On the contrary, they were deeply rooted in the socialist tradition, and most of all in what the ‘Comintern people’ feature called the blood-stained five-sixths of the world in which communists were liable to be persecuted.

Insofar as the object was more to galvanise and enkindle than to embody the principle of centralisation, different figures appealing to different constituencies often stood in ambiguous hierarchical relation with one another. In the USA, there was certainly a cult of the communists’ general secretary Earl Browder. Nevertheless, this was not at the expense of the regular ovations to Browder’s rival and collaborator W.Z. Foster, who had the stronger appeal to the party core and who on his sixtieth birthday in 1941 was greeted by an audience of eighteen thousand while Paul Robeson sang The Purest Kind of Guy.36 In Britain, it was William Gallacher, not the party leader Pollitt, who in 1936 published the autobiography which has been speculatively linked with a Comintern project of cult-building, just as it was Foster and not Browder who produced such a narrative for American readers.37 In France, only the general secretary Maurice Thorez could have written Fils du peuple, and it was Thorez who most of all embodied the youthful promise of popular-front communism. Even this, however, did not at this stage preclude the memorialisation of Barbusse, who died in 1935, or the continued public veneration of the veteran Marcel Cachin. Alone of the western parties, the PCF from 1935 also provided one of the Comintern secretaries in the person of André Marty; and both as the semi-legendary hero of the 1919 Black Sea mutiny, and as one of the leaders of the International Brigade, Marty too enjoyed what Rémi Skoutelsky rightly describes as a veritable cult.38

Above all, there was the example of Spain. Though it was the Spanish party secretary José Díaz who figured on Borkenau’s list of spurious Comintern supermen, it was not Díaz but Dolores Ibárruri, the famous Pasionaria, who epitomised the republican cause both within Spain and far beyond. A seasoned and even cynical observer of the communists, Borkenau was nevertheless powerfully impressed by Ibárruri and regarded her as the figure who next to Dimitrov had done most to restore the Comintern’s damaged reputation. ‘The masses worship her, not for her intellect, but as a sort of saint who is to lead them in the days of trial and temptation’, Borkenau wrote. The only woman to figure so prominently among these Comintern people, Ibárruri had a consummate command of themes of symbolic motherhood

35 ‘Comintern people’, Communist International, 4 Mar. 1935, p. 291-3. The Italian Gramsci, though afterwards the most illustrious of these prisoners, was not during his lifetime accorded a comparable publicity, for reasons which certainly included his differences with the Comintern under Stalin.36 James R. Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 212.37 Kevin Morgan, « Ainsi pour Gallacher? Quelques regards sur la construction de la vie communiste modèle en Grande-Bretagne », Communisme, 87 (2006), p. 29-46.38 Rémi Skoutelsky, L’espoir guidait leurs pas. Les volontaires français dans les Brigades internationales 1936-1939, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1998, p. 56-58.

10

and widowhood. In the halcyon years of the popular front, there was no communist, not even Dimitrov, who better demonstrates the personification of the cause by the tribune or the martyr who was also sometimes the leader.

Within the USSR, the sustained promotion of the Stalin cult can be dated more or less simultaneously with Dimitrov’s emergence as a public figure. It was in the latter months of 1933, having fallen away after the marking of his fiftieth birthday four years earlier, that Stalin’s image began to figure more in Pravda, and his name to appear more frequently in lead editorials.39 These of course were the months of the Leipzig trial; and within weeks of the news of Dimitrov’s acquittal there was also fortuitously the first ‘real explosion’ of the Stalin cult with the seventeenth Soviet party congress or so-called Congress of Victors.40 Until reaching its pre-war apogee around the time of the Moscow trials, the development of Stalin’s cult was from this point on relentless. Nevertheless, the explosion that registered internationally was surprisingly muffled. Historians of the phenomenon within the USSR agree that Stalin’s personal cult has to be located within the wider turn to exceptionality and the heroic so evident in the stalinist political culture of the 1930s.41 If one may also trace the internationalisation of these practices, it was, at this stage, through the wider turn to the individual rather than the particular fixation on Stalin himself.

The obvious exception to this might have been the authorised Stalin biography which Barbusse published with an eye to an international readership in 1935. Referring to Stalin as ‘the most visible man in the world, and yet one of the least familiar’, Barbusse’s original intention had been for a ‘complete portrait’ of the living individual on whom a whole epoch of social transformation pivoted.42 His frustrations in attempting to produce this are amply documented in Barbusse’s papers, and his citation of various victims of the looming terror was in any case to lead to the volume’s rapid withdrawal from circulation. Nor, until 1939, was there any Soviet-produced equivalent. The defining stalinist text of the first phase of cult-building was consequently not a life of Stalin but the History of the CPSU (B), or famous Short Course – from which biographical materials were actually edited out at Stalin’s behest, on the premise that party education was not best served by a history constructed around particular individuals.43 Though previously based in Paris, when the Russian-born British correspondent Alexander Werth arrived in Moscow in July 1941, he could still comment on

39 Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult, op. cit.(cf. note 7), p. 36-37, 227-229; Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet public culture from revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 65.40 Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia. Terror, propaganda and dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 148.41 Ibid., p. 153-154; David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis. Soviet ideology, indoctrination, and terror under Stalin, 1927-1941 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), ch. 4.42 Henri Barbusse, Staline. Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme (1935), Paris, Flammarion, 1936 edn), p. 4; Barbusse to Alfred Kurella, 6 Feb. 1934 (Barbusse papers, PCF archives, Paris).43 Sarah Davies, ‘Stalin and the making of the leader cult in the 1930s’ in Balázs Apor et al (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern bloc (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 36-7.

11

how little westerners knew of Stalin and how ‘practically all the well-known books’ about him were hostile.44

The distinction between an integrating and an enkindling figure is clear in the context of the Comintern. Where already Stalin’s cult mattered profoundly here was among the population of ‘Cominternians’ directly exposed to Soviet practices for whom the cult served as an integrating-cum-disciplinary device that fixed the loyalties of the apparatus on the single unifying figure of the vozhd.45 In this respect, the Comintern’s seventh and last world congress of July-August 1935 provided its nearest counterpart to the Congress of Victors, marked by tumultuous ovations and a formal address to Stalin by the Italian Palmiro Togliatti. What was nevertheless missing in this instance was the wider demonstration of Stalin’s authority. In contrast to the Soviet party’s congresses, Stalin did not deign to address the Comintern delegates, and even the Pravda photo apparently showing him meeting with delegates was a political contrivance.46 Instead, it was Dimitrov who delivered the congress report that confirmed the turn to anti-fascist unity; and it was Dimitrov, both for communists and for a wider public, whose moment this indelibly was.

‘Here what the Seventh Congress said / If true, if false, is live or dead’, wrote Cornford, and it was Dimitrov again who had said it. By the time of the Spanish war, it was in ‘the Party of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Dimitrov’ that communists like Cornford had enlisted; and Dimitrov now was described as ‘pilot’ of the Comintern, just as Stalin piloted the USSR itself. Marcel Willard was a Paris-based communist lawyer whom Dimitrov would have had defend him at Leipzig had the Nazis permitted it. Five years later, in 1938, Willard published a book in which the hero of Leipzig served as centre-piece of a celebration of the courtroom tribune across the ages. Nor was it merely by chance, Willard wrote, that it was Dimitrov, the ‘tested pilot, rudder in his hand’, who steered the international movement for unity which his own example had done so much to bring into being.47

The paradox of Stalin’s cult internationally was that in a culture of the written word it was verbally impoverished, and that in a world of mass communications it privileged rites of participation from which most western communists were excluded. Boris Souvarine commented acidly on Stalin’s ‘precious gift of dumbness’, and whatever the visuality of his cult within the USSR, it was not in this way that a public could be mobilised for political struggle.48 Dumbness in a culture of the word could hardly advertise itself. In the British Left Review, counterpart to Commune in France, there were dedications in verse or prose to Ibárruri, Thälmann and Rákosi as well as Dimitrov. Cornford had also devoted an early poem 44 Alexander Werth, Moscow ’41 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1942), pp. 47-8.45 For the Cominternians, see Brigitte Studer, The Transnational World of the Cominternians (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).46 Denis Peschanski (ed.), Marcel Cachin. Carnets 1906-1947, Paris, CNRS Editions, 1993-8, tome 4, p. 111, entry for 26 Jul. 1935.47 Marcel Willard, La défense accuse ... De Babeuf à Dimitrov (Paris : Éditions Sociales Internationales, 1938), p. 205; also Harry Pollitt, “Join the party that builds unity”, Daily Worker (London), 1 May 1936; L’Exploité (Parti communiste français, Aisne-Marne regional weekly, 14 Nov. 1936 in André Marty papers (PCF archives, Seine St Denis) 281 J box 23.48 Boris Souvarine, Stalin. A critical survey of Bolshevism, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1939), p. 412.

12

to Kirov; Fox had published a popular-heroic biography of Lenin focusing on the years before and leading up to revolution rather than those of its accomplishment. Stalin, still in 1933, barely figured even in such a treatment; and it is remarkable how few throughout the 1930s were the international productions independently inspired by the vozhd. One can well understand why a romantic Lenin cult might seem to pose a danger for the ‘sober reality’ of the Stalin regime.49 But if this was true of Lenin, perhaps it was also true of the Dimitrov who shone like a flame in darkness, or of the Pasionaria whose clothes her followers were said to touch ‘to make sure that she is really and truly of flesh and blood, just like anyone else’. 50 If Stalin’s cult was to prevail internationally, as it had already within the USSR, it could only be at the expense of such figures.

From political equal to more than a father

If historians have been so ready to hold Stalin responsible for Kirov’s murder, it is because no such figure did achieve a political kudos rivalling or threatening Stalin’s own without either physically or metaphorically being cut down to size. In Kirov’s case, historians have instanced his greater popularity with delegates at the Congress of Victors itself. Within the Comintern too, Borkenau made the point that even leaders enjoying an ‘absolute authority’ within their parties could not be allowed such prestige as might make them independent of Stalin’s orders.51 For just this reason, there was an inherent tension between the enkindling cult which Dimitrov had represented and the integration cult centred on Stalin. In one sense, it was true at every level of communist politics that a tension existed between the deployment of the communists’ personal capital in the advancement of their party’s influence and its attenuation and control in the interests of its overriding internal disciplines. Nevertheless, with a figure like Dimitrov himself enjoying the status of a tested international pilot, Stalin’s authority risked being more directly compromised except as underpinned by some more explicit form of subjection. Over the course of the 1930s, one can trace the resolution of this dilemma in three distinct but overlapping responses to Dimitrov’s wider public standing, namely its exploitation, its emulation and its evisceration. If Borkenau was right in linking Dimitrov’s initial example with the opening out of communism to a wider anti-fascist public, his incorporation within an unambiguous cultic hierarchy served to reinforce the unnegotiable disciplines that were centred on Stalin himself. The formalisation of these processes was only fully accomplished in the years immediately before Stalin’s death in 1953. Nevertheless, it was already clearly demonstrated by the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, when Dimitrov lent his now diminished authority to the policy of cordial engagement with his own erstwhile Nazi persecutors.

The initial exploitation of Dimitrov’s reputation had had very different objects. It was Dimitrov himself who had described his achievement at Leipzig as constituting ‘political

49 Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 25 Jan. 1934 cited Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia. op. cit.(cf. note 46), p. 178-179.50 Díaz cited Pasionaria. The story of a miner’s daughter (London: CPGB, 1937), p. 22.51 Franz Borkenau, The Communist International, op. cit. (cf. note 4), p. 395.

13

capital for the Communist International that ought to be exploited comprehensively and entirely rationally, as well as opportunely’.52 Stalin concurred, and it was because of the ‘colossal resonance’ that Dimitrov’s voice had among the masses that Stalin had vested the leadership of the Comintern in him.53 This exploitation of Dimitrov’s sudden celebrity was crucially assisted by the relocation to Moscow, as his secretary, of the German communist Alfred Kurella, who had a long Comintern track record having latterly been assigned to Barbusse’s politico-cultural weekly Monde. With Kurella’s assistance, there was by mid-1934 a Dimitrov biographical manuscript running to ‘hundreds of pages’ with excursions into matters ‘historical, biographical, philosophical, political and anecdotal’ and a ‘whole series of entrancing episodes’ from his childhood and life as a revolutionary.54 Already, reflecting the atmosphere following the Congress of Victors, there was a chapter entitled ‘With Stalin’, and it was Stalin himself who objected that its language was not advisable ‘between equals’.55 There was also an interim biography emanating from the CI cadres department, though this did not much cater for a wider public.56 There was however a second ‘Brown Book’ of the Leipzig trial, following the famous Brown Book of the Hitler terror which Münzenberg had initiated, and this offered a vivid biographical depiction of the figure it described as the trial’s shining light to the world.57 There was also a volume of Dimitrov prison letters, collated by Kurella, and a Dimitrov film scenario, commissioned by Mezhrabpom-Film, on which Kurella collaborated with other German exiles in Moscow.58

The issue of emulation is more conjectural. There is no doubt that the establishment of the Hitler regime served as stimulus to the reviving Stalin cult, and the inference has some plausibility that Hitler’s example may in part have been the catalyst.59 On the other hand, the fascist state cult of Mussolini had by this time been developing as if inexorably for over a decade. It is therefore unclear why Hitler’s example should have registered with Stalin so much more quickly than Mussolini’s, particularly as the fascist regime’s grandiose tenth anniversary celebrations in 1932 had presented a symbiosis of leader and vaunted revolution offering far more obvious analogies with Bolshevism. If already Hitler overshadowed Mussolini, it was as threat at least as much as exemplar; this was not only a likely stimulus to a counter-cult but was doubtless reinforced by Dimitrov’s successful demonstration of this role through the Leipzig trial.

Stalin’s turning to Barbusse as his authorised biographer in the late summer of 1933 underlines the importance of this international context. Already some eighteen months

52 Ivo Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933-1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 11, entry for 3 Apr. 1934.53 Ibid., p. 16, entry for 25 Apr. 1934.54 A. Kypers, « Ce que sera le livre de Dimitroff », Monde, 8 Jun. 1934.55 Ivo Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, op. cit. (cf. note 58), p. 18-20, entry for 2 May 1934.56 S. Blagoéva, Georges Dimitrov. La vie et les luttes d’un révolutionnaire prolétarien, Paris, Bureau d’Éditions, 1934.57 The Reichstag Fire Trial. The Second Brown Book of the Hitler Terror (London: Bodley Head, 1934), p. 136-158.58 Günter Agde, Kämpfer. Biographie eines Films und seiner Macher, Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2001.59 See Yves Cohen, Le Siècle des chefs, op. cit. (cf: note 11), pp. 727-8.

14

earlier, Stalin had had his greatest literary supporter Maxim Gorky sounded out in this capacity. If that might have suggested the analogy with Lenin, to whom Gorky had devoted one of the best-known portrait tributes, Barbusse more than any other communist writer offered the prospect of reaching an international public far beyond the communists themselves. In publicising the Reichstag fire campaign, Barbusse had been one of the first to bring out Dimitrov’s role and to publicise his record among a wider readership.60 With Dimitrov’s surprise acquittal, it was also Barbusse, as we have seen, who temporarily turned from his Stalin commission to produce his biographical pamphlet for the Thälmann campaign. Stalin’s preference for Barbusse over a Soviet biographer – the obvious one was the more than willing Emelyan Yaroslavsky – suggests a concern with the same sort of audience and perhaps, in theory, even the same sort of treatment. The American market was certainly a preoccupation, and immediately on securing the Stalin commission Barbusse had embarked on a US speaking tour and signed a contract for the volume’s English translation. His biographical commission must therefore be located within that phase of Stalin’s advertisement to an international public that was also reflected in his public or semi-public colloquies with H.G. Wells (1934) and Romain Rolland (1935) as well as Feuchtwanger.

The evisceration of Dimitrov’s public persona is not difficult to establish. As the Comintern itself was caught within the terror, his own insecurities are vividly attested by his diary entries, including one describing a lunch at Voroshilov’s at which Stalin gave vent to a paean to the middle cadres. ‘They’re the ones who choose the leader’, he commented ominously. ‘They don’t try to climb above their station; you don’t even notice them.’61 While the posthumous cults of Kirov and Maxim Gorky now attained ‘fantastic heights’ in film as well as text renditions, Dimitrov by contrast experienced a form of relative self-effacement to which his own instinct for self-preservation must surely have contributed.62 The autobiographical manuscript once bound for western readers never reached them. Kurella’s semi-fictionalised Dimitrov cult film was briefly screened in German and Russian-language versions in December 1936, but then immediately consigned to an obscurity from which it never really re-emerged. In 1938 there was commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the Leipzig trial. But when the following year Dimitrov was called upon to justify the Comintern’s relinquishment of the primary struggle against fascism, it was entirely without forewarning or consultation.

Stalin’s sixtieth birthday fell just three months later. Compared with his fiftieth a decade earlier, it is striking, first, how much more extensive was the coverage in the communist press abroad, and, secondly, how little conversely this international aspect was reflected in the Soviet-centred commemoration of the USSR itself. In this sense, Stalin’s was now the cult at once of leader and of leading state, and only through that state of the wider cult community beyond. Nevertheless, if both power and protest could be symbolised by the individual, so could acquiescence and the recognition of some higher authority. It was therefore notable that 60 Barbusse, « L’incendie du Reichstag. Nous accusons Hitler », Monde, 17 Jun. 1933.61 Ivo Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, op. cit. (cf. note 58), pp. 62-7, entry for 7 Nov. 1937.62 Matthew E. Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), ch. 12; Sheila Fitzpatrick cited A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928-39 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 317.

15

Dimitrov and Pasionaria alone of the Comintern’s leading personalities should have been called upon to contribute to the birthday accolades paid to Stalin in Pravda. Ibárruri recalled her eagerness to catch sight of him at the Congress of Victors, and how this had ‘completely enveloped’ her thoughts and feelings and provided both the model and the inspiration she took back with her to Spain. It was like the making over to Stalin of her own symbolic capital, and the translation of the culture of the gift into the demonstration of political compliancy and virtual vassalage. ‘Better than any writer or biographer’, Ibárruri continued, ‘the people themselves express the significance of Stalin, when in the words of their rank and file representatives, they say: “For us Stalin is more than our own father.”’ 63

A summary treatment of this type can hardly do justice to the variations between one political context and another. E.H. Carr, for example, once observed that Dimitrov was nowhere else so revered as an anti-fascist symbol as in Britain.64 There was, on the other hand, no British counterpart to Barbusse’s Staline, and even a cursory reading of the French communist press reveals a greater readiness than in Britain to find ways of saluting Stalin and occasions on which to do so.65

Nevertheless, this is not fundamentally a story of national specificities. Marcel Willard had certainly been as active as any Briton in Dimitrov’s cause, and his book La défense accuse was an archetypal presentation of his popular-front era cult. What also helps to set these cults in a longer perspective is the volume’s reissuing in 1952 and 1955 acoording to the changing Cold War imperatives that were outlined for him by the PCF secretariat. Comparing the latter edition with that of 1938, one may note at once the expunging of transgressors like Marty and the Romanian Ana Pauker, and the inclusion of the now mandatory items on both Stalin and Thorez. As for Dimitrov himself, though he remained the core around which the book was organised, there could be no suggestion now of an equivalence with Stalin in their different spheres of activity. His earlier styling as ‘the bolshevik Dimitrov’ was itself now amended to stalinien, and his characterisation as ‘tested pilot, rudder in hand’ had disappeared.66 As Vanessa Codaccioni observes, Dimitrov remained in France a central point of reference in the communist pantheon of heroes.67 The pantheon of all the gods, nevertheless, was now a tiered one, like the wedding-cake style adopted by Soviet architects, and with Stalin now the untouchable figure surmounting all. There is no space here to describe Dimitrov’s descent from a genuine proletarian heroism to the small-state cult of his final years. Nevertheless, there is no figure who better represents both the initial duality of the communist cult of the individual and the process of its stalinisation.

63 Translated as “Pasionaria Tells of First Meeting People’s Leader”, Daily Worker (New York), 21. Dec. 1939.64 E.H. Carr, The Twilight of Comintern 1930-1935 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 233.65 See for example the materials produced on Stalin’s 55th birthday, « Salut au meilleur disciple de Lénine! » and Marcel Cachin, « L’exemple de Staline », Cahiers du bolchevisme, p. 3-11 and « “Staline, nous sommes fiers d’être tes disciples!” », L’Humanité, 24 Dec. 1934.66 Marcel Willard, « Figure de Dimitrov », Commune, Nov. 1933, p. 167; Marcel Willard, La défense accuse, Paris, Éditions Sociales, 1955 edn, p. 72-3, 92-3, 159, 348; also Willard, La défense accuse (1938 edn), p. ix-x, 205, 340.67 Vanessa Codaccioni, Punir les opposants. PCF et procès politiques (1947-1962), Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2013, p.194.

16