KRAVCHENKO

Cold war in Paris

Paris, January 1949. Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko's libel suit against the French communist weekly "Les Lettres françaises" became the "trial of the century". In a courtroom packed with journalists, Kravchenko called on witnesses who spoke for the first time about the famine in Ukraine, the purges, and, 15 years before Solzhenitsyn, the hell of the Soviet gulag. Opposite him, the Moscow-supported paper brought in witnesses and intellectuals, who in battle order, fiercely denied the evidence. What insidious mechanisms force one to remain blind to the truth ?