French defamation trials over Soviet-camp accounts raised Western awareness of Soviet crimes

Evidence

These pitfalls were not hard to spot. That list of beautiful, distant Communist goals was matched by an equally long list of grim realities: labour camps, intimidation, unjust imprisonments, killings, famines, shortages and a lack of personal freedom. The first major shock had come in the 1930s, when news emerged of the Moscow show trials in which disgraced party members ‘confessed’ to acts of sabotage or conspiracy before being sent to their deaths. In 1946, more information came out, some of it through a book called I Chose Freedom, by the Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko. When the book was translated into French in 1947, the Communist-supported journal Les lettres françaises dismissed it as a US government fabrication. Kravchenko’s lawyers sued the journal, and the case was heard in Paris early in 1949, with witnesses brought in to rhapsodise about life in the Soviet Union, and to discredit the author. Kravchenko technically won, but was given a single franc in damages. The following year, another writer sued Les lettres françaises: David Rousset, a Buchenwald survivor who had been attacked by the journal after calling for an investigation into Soviet camps. He won his case. Both trials were contentious, but did much to raise awareness that the Soviet Union was not the Worker’s Paradise it claimed to be — or not yet. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 769

Categorization

• XREF: The ideological-blindness and self-deception themes connect to the book’s own existentialist lexicon — bad faith as a collective, not just personal, phenomenon. — connects to: Soviet brutality shook Western Communist sympathizers including Sartre and Beauvoir — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 852

Broader Connections

• Soviet brutality shook Western Communist sympathizers including Sartre and Beauvoir #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 852