From his birth, The World gives a special place to the Soviet Union. This is evidenced by its first headline, dated December 19, 1944, on the treaty of alliance and mutual assistance signed a few days earlier in Moscow, between the French provisional government and the USSR, in the presence of General de Gaulle and Joseph Stalin. As the Red Army advances on the Eastern Front, the text aims to prevent “all new threat from Germany”. The defeat of the Nazi troops soon sealed the return to favor of the communists in France. At the same time, an anti-Americanism developed in the immediate post-war period from which the young daily newspapers did not escape.
Is it because he was, before the war, a teacher and journalist in Prague? Its founder, Hubert Beuve-Méry, who himself produced a report in the land of the Soviets, excluded from “join the communist camp, whose Stalinist totalitarianism horrified him”notes Patrick Eveno in his History of the newspaper “Le Monde” 1944-2004 (Albin Michel, 2004). “Beuve”, alias Sirius, will ensure that the editorial staff “systematically notes attacks on democracy and the absence of freedoms in the countries of Eastern Europe or under Soviet supervision”. This editorial line will remain a constant, from Stalin to Putin.
A few years later, when the master of the Kremlin died, “the world never stops turning”written, in The World of March 7, 1953, André Fontaine, under the enormous headline on the front page devoted to the disappearance, two days earlier, of the “Marshal Stalin”. The head of the newspaper’s foreign service then pleaded for the strengthening of a Europe, “even reduced to six”equipped with a common army, with a prescience that resonates strongly today. But, at the time, the daily street life of Italians still treated with a certain consideration a man still crowned with the Soviet victory over Hitler.
We shudder when we read that the one who reigned by terror for more than thirty years “reconciled Russia with the revolution”and if Stalinism “was not strictly speaking a doctrine”it was similar “rather a method, a tactic, a wisdom”. We have to wait until the end of the column on “the man and his heritage” for another assessment to emerge: “The pursuit of this mathematical happiness [le communisme] populated concentration camps and mass graves; it has transformed millions of men into civil and military robots. It has reduced others to the role of thurifers devoid of the most basic dignity. »
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