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Victor Kravchenko in a Paris CourtroomExcerpts

From the chapter on I Chose Freedom

The First Defector

...When offered the opportunity,[Kravchenko] leaped to his feet and began a carefully prepared and impassioned statement. A metaphorical tremor of apprehension rattled the front bench of the defense. The first victims of propaganda are sometimes the propagandists themselves. Nordmann and his colleagues seem honestly to have been expecting a shifty blackguard or a stumblebum. Instead, Kravchenko was large and commanding, approaching nattiness in a tasteful suit, vigorous, coherent, voluble, and -self--confident to the point of insult. So far as anyone could tell from the reaction of the Russian speakers in the public seats, he was also spellbinding...

Photo: Well dressed and well groomed, the charismatic Kravchenko makes a typically vigorous intervention in the Paris courtroom in which his civil action against Les Lettres française was being heard. The protracted trial regularly drew standing-room-only crowds of spectators. Though Kravchenko won only the symbolic judgment of a single franc, the propaganda damage he inflicted on the French Communist Party was enormous. From The Anti-Communist Manifestos.

 

From the chapter on Darkness at Noon

[Koestler’s] other great Parisian friend and ally was Raymond Aron. One is tempted to write “the great” Aron—one of the finest and most influential public intellectuals of the twentieth century. In retrospect, it

was Aron among all the political scribblers of the capital who had the sanest and most responsible understanding of the meaning of the conflict between Moscow and Washington, a struggle “in which peace is impossible but war improbable.”  As the improbability of “hot” war was a major heresy, comparatively few people had spent much time thinking about to how to conduct a “cold” one. In the socialist camp, the “Zhdanov doctrine,” both law and gospel, held war to be inevitable. This also was the view of many conservatives in the United States. In this view two fixed and immutable systems—the one “socialist,” the other “capitalist”—were locked in an historically inevitable struggle. But in 1948, amidst the continuing drama of Le Zéro et l’infini, Aron published his brilliant and prophetic book The Great Schism, which, taking a pragmatic view expressed in a tone of moderation and reflection, predicted that the battle would most likely be determined on two fronts: the economic and the ideological.

 

From the chapter on Out of the Night

Still living in his tent, he wrote his first successful article. It was called “Ploetzensee—Hitler’s Slaughterhouse.” It was accepted immediately by the editor of Ken. Ken, then in its second and penultimate year of publication, proved a flash in the pan, but a very bright flash. Hemingway was only one of several big names to illuminate its brief life. Without skipping a beat, Krebs returned to his tent and wrote a second, “Pillar of the Comintern,” a short character sketch of Ernst Wollweber, or “Ernst X,” as the cautious editor of Ken magazine preferred. This was a little riskier. Anybody could bash Hitler with impunity. Bashing a Communist was “Red--baiting.” Wollweber cuts a large swath through Out of the Night, and he is most definitly a solidly historical personage and a real Communist. We know for a fact that he was the head of the very ambitious Communist espionage efforts in prewar Scandinavia. After the war he appears as one of the top functionaries in the gray and grim Communist government of East Germany, before becoming an “unperson” about 1960. But by then he had already outlived Krebs by a good decade.

 

Photo: Ernst Wollweber (left) as a gray eminence of the Stasi, about 1955. Like Krebs he had begun in the German merchant marine. His organization of Comintern espionage in Scandinavia in the 1930s is well documented.

From the chapter on Witness

Among other surprises with which Koestler hoped to delight Chambers was the company of Margarete Buber--Neumann, who was rusticating in the same Alpine village. As Koestler introduced her to Chambers, it would perhaps be a good idea to reintroduce her to readers of this book. Buber--Neumann (1901–1989) was the German Communist and anti--Communist who was married to the son of the famous Jewish theologian, Martin Buber. She divorced her husband to become the “Communist wife” of Heinz Neumann, second in command of the German Communist Party. When Hitler came to power, the couple fled to Moscow. Heinz Neumann disappeared in the Great Purge. A little later, Margarete herself was thrown into the Gulag. At the time of the Hitler--Stalin Pact she was among the German Communists taken out of the Russian prisons to be transported directly to German prisons. After the war, she published one of the more remarkable concentration camp memoirs, titled in English Under Two Dictators. She is related to the -anti--Communist masterpieces that are the subject of this book in the following ways. She was Arthur Koestler’s friend and, especially, the friend of Koestler’s greatfriend Willi Münzenberg, her -brother--in--law. She was of course in prison while Koestler was writing Darkness at Noon, but they became good friends after the war. Richard Krebs had worked closely with Heinz Neumann, who was, in fact, as violent and ruthless a Communist terrorist as those who killed him in Russia.


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