JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

G. Sudiene’s Le Communisme Stalien en France certainly has a great piece of design for its cover.  The pamphlet was printed–it looks like–in May 1945, right at the time of the Allied victory in Europe. By this time Stalin had bullied his way halfway across eastern Europe and certainly was no longer the friendly face of an ally as it may or may not have been in 1942/3. In any event, I found it interesting that while thumbing my way through the pamphlet I bumped into a section heading called “La Grande Peur des Communistes Staliens”, which uses the intellectually-straightening phrase, “the Great Fear” or “the Great Terror”.  I’m familiar with the phrase mostly because of the title of the 1968 Robert Conquest book, and so far as I can recall I hadn’t encountered it much during the contemporary-ish time in which the plague of terror was occurring. This one comes close, coming six years or so after the end of that particular piece tragedy (the Great Terror ranging from 1936-1938 in Conquest’s book). In this pamphlet this period is expanded to 1933-1939. I couldn’t find anything about the author in a quick-search, and the pamphlet itself nearly escapes mention. (On the other hand I did see the phrase “judeo-Comministe”, which is usually meaning “Jewish Bolshevism”, which is a standard and long-established piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, though I didn’t see anything in the text to support it…that’s a pretty big bomb to drop, though, on an unsuspecting reader.