AROUND THE WORLD
International Viewpoint #261 November 1994
ONE RESULT of the collapse of the Soviet Union has been the opening of Soviet archives and the publication of a series of memoirs by former KGB officials. But, asks KEITH MANN, what is the significance of a posthumous article from an otherwise little known member of the French Communist Party?
N FRANCE, the French Communist Party (PCF) has abandoned its pretensions to be the sole authentic voice of the French working class. However, the limits of their openness and self-criticism have been underscored by the publication, without comment, in l'Humanité, the PCF daily, of a posthumous article by a French Stalinist functionary accused of helping arrange the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
The information which has recently been made public due to the opening of Soviet archives has gone a long way in setting the record straight on some of the most sordid crimes committed in the 1930s by the Stalinist apparatus against opponents in the labour movement. Charges — denied for decades by the CPs - that Stalinist agents assassinated anti-fascist fighters in the Spanish Civil War, and deliberately sabotaged that struggle as part of a foreign policy which gave assurances to imperialist powers and attempted to subordinate struggles around the world to the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, have now been corroborated. The recently published memoirs of the former KGB general Sudoplatov have confirmed the accusations, made by Trotskyists and others. that the assassinations of left opposition leaders such as Rudolf Klement and Ignace Reiss, as well as Trotsky himself, were indeed ordered by Stalin.
In France, the PCF no longer considers Trotskyists as "counter-revolutionaries". In fact, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR, French section of the Fourth International) has for several years had a bookstall at its annual festival, the "Fete de l'Humanite", and last December was invited for the first time to send observers to the party's 28th Congress. Historians close to the PCF have recently gone out of their way to invite Trotskyist historians to collaborate on research pro-
But those hoping that these developments signalled a generalised policy of openness would have been disappointed 36 by the said article which appeared in 29 August 1994 edition of l'Humanité. The author, Georges Fournial, had requested that the article be published only after his death. The article denied the accusations that Fournial had helped to arrange the assassination of Trotsky (although, curiously, he never explicitly denies the
Who exactly was Georges Fournial? A leading member of the teachers' union, his role in the PCF was that of an important behind-the-scenes cadre. Although in charge of relations with Latin America, as a member of the PF's commission on foreign relations, Fournial never spoke at PCF congresses or was a member of its Central Committee.
### Congress
According to his account, Fournial came to Mexico City in early 1938 on behalf of the International Teachers' Union, to prepare a congress of Latin American teachers. He then left Mexico in June or July of the same year. He later attended the congress, which was held in Havana, Cuba, in September 1939. Taken captive in Germany after France's defeat in June 1940, he remained in prison until March 1945. He claims to have learnt of Trotsky's death only after he returned to France, and that the first he heard of his supposed role in Trotsky's death was by way of an article in the French publication La Révolution Prolétarienne.
Fournial's arrival in Mexico in 1938 immediately aroused attention amongst Trotsky's entourage. From Paris, French Trotskyist Gerald Rosenthal wrote to Trotsky's secretary in Mexico, Jan van Heijinoort, that the Teachers' Union militant was "young, energetic, and must be considered as an agent of the GPU" (the forerunner of the KGB), an opinion echoed by another prominent French Trotskyist, Pierre Naville. The French Trotskyist publication La Lutte Ouvrière and the US newspaper Socialist Appeal asked publicly: "What is Georges Fournial doing in Mexico?" Trotsky's friends had good reason to be suspicious of the arrival of any functionary of the Stalinist apparatus in Mexico (where he had been granted political asylum by the bourgeois nationalist regime of Lazar Cárdenas in January 1937). Ramón Mercader, who eventually killed Trotsky in August 1940, was only one of a whole network set up by the GPU to carry out the assassination. For example, the Mexican painter and fervent Stalinist David Siqueros organised an unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky's life in May 1940.
While no hard evidence has yet surfaced definitively linking Fournial with Trotsky's murder, the tone of the article calls his alleged innocence into question. He ends the article by calling on those interested in the affair to conserve a "scientific doubt". The question immediately arises as to why, if he had nothing to hide, Fournial waited to publish his denial until after his death when nobody could question him. Earlier in the article, he states: "...if Stalin wanted the violent death of Trotsky ...would he need the services of a little teacher ...for a 'contract" of this nature?" At the time of Trotsky's assassination, the Stalinist press circulated the lie that Trotsky was murdered by a "disillusioned follower". Yet even before Mercader received the Order of Lenin following his release from prison in 1960, the GPU's responsibility for the crime was public knowledge, and recent revelations have only confirmed this. For Fournial to state that Stalin might not have been involved, and then immediately deny his own involvement, makes his denial highly suspect.
### Prestige
Unrepentant Stalinists, nostalgic for the days when the CPs and Stalin himself enjoyed tremendous prestige in the working class, still remain in the PF, as in similar parties. It would be unrealistic to expect the PF to proclaim that Trotsky and the left opposition were right after all. However, given the role played by the PCF in the international campaign of lies, slanders and distortions against Trotsky, and its proclaimed openness and abhorrence of the methods of the past, L'humanité could have published the article with a statement of regret at their participation in the campaign. Alternatively, it could simply not have published the article. By publishing such an evasive article, which raises more questions than it answers, the PCF has shown that it has a long way to go in confronting its own past.
At a time when the entire socialist project has been discredited in the eyes of millions around the world, a situation to which the Communist parties have contributed, those claiming to stand for a socialist alternative to today's savage liberalism cannot afford the slightest association with the undemocratic practices which have so badly weakened the international labour movement in the past. This means confronting the truth. In this regard l'Humanité's treatment of the Fournial affair fails. *