Очерки истории Франции XX–XXI веков. Статьи Н. Н. Наумовой и ее учеников

But it was wages policy that provoked the final break. Whatever the benefits of some policy initiatives backed by the PCF – the greater security enjoyed by public-sector workers after nationalisations, and the foundation of France’s welfare state – the PCF’s support for wage restraint alienated workers. That was already visible in the slow rate of party membership renewals that spring, as well as in the CGT’s disappointing results in elections to governing bodies of the social security system.[386]A strike over wages at Renault, organised by a small Trotskyist group from 25 April, left the CGT, after four days, with little choice but to join in. And when Ramadier, by now resolved to force the issue, asked for a vote of confidence over wages policy on 4 May, all of the Communist Deputies, including the ministers, voted against the government of which they were a part. It is likely that they expected Ramadier to resign; in the ensuing negotiations to form a government, they could demonstrate the impossibility of ruling the country without Communist co-operation. Instead, Ramadier found non-Communist replacements for the PCF ministers, and carried on governing with the support of Socialists, MRP and Radicals.[387]

With the dismissal of Thorez and his colleagues on 5 May 1947, the PCF was out of office and friendless: Stalin’s strategy of November 1944 had clearly failed. The PCF leaders, however, went on trying to implement it for five more months. On the international scene, the PCF evoked the ‘division of the world into two blocs’, but as a danger to be avoided rather than a fait accompli – even if the summer saw increasingly hostile statements towards ‘American imperialism’, especially after the Soviets had finally withdrawn from negotiations over the Marshall Plan, as well as (unsubstantiated) claims that the Americans had engineered the Party’s removal from government. In domestic politics, the Communists now did nothing to restrain outbreaks of industrial unrest; the aim was to prove how necessary their participation in government was. Thus, the emphasis at the Eleventh Congress, held from 25 to 29 June, remained the PCF’s status as a ‘party of government’ and the need to bring the Socialists (if not the MRP) back to a left-wing alliance. Even on 22 September, Thorez was still calling for the PCF’s return to office within a ‘government of democratic union’.[388]

Just as L’Humanité was carrying Thorez’s message to thousands of Communist readers, Duclos was gathering with leading figures from the Italian and East European Communist parties in Sklarska-Poreba. What they heard from the Soviet Politburo member Andreï Zhdanov could leave them in no doubt that Moscow’s line had changed radically. The world, said Zhdanov, was now divided into ‘two camps’ – the ‘imperialist and anti-democratic’ camp aimed at the ‘world domination of American imperialism’, and the ‘anti-imperialist and democratic’ camp, led by the Soviet Union, which sought the ‘undermining of imperialism, the consolidation of democracy and the eradication of the remnants of fascism’. Particularly dangerous in this confrontation was the ‘treacherous policy of right-wing Socialists like Blum in France, Attlee and Bevin in England, Schumacher in Germany’, who, as the imperialists’ ‘faithful accomplices’, were ‘sowing dissension in the ranks of the working class and poisoning its mind’.[389]It followed that alliances with such traitors, as practised until May by the French and Italian parties, were a crass error. The French and Italian comrades now stood accused of legalism, opportunism, and parliamentarianism, as well as a soft line towards the Marshall Plan, and were forced to make a thoroughgoing self-criticism before going home.