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officers at Katyn as soon as they discovered it? (The question forms the basis of an exceptionally well-informed recent thriller about World War II, Robert Harris’s
Enigma
). We may argue that it should have done, following the maxim
fiat justitia, ruat coelum
, but the British government chose to keep quiet about it in 1943, on political grounds and not because it had illusions about the October revolution. Indeed, at one point Furet comes close to recognizing the pragmatic case for choosing sides in his treatment of the Spanish Civil War. The communists’ influence grew, notably among moderates, because it came to appear to subordinate all to victory over Franco (p. 300). George Orwell noted that a lot of people more or less honestly held the opinion that one should not talk about what was going on in Spain, or about the role played by the Communist Party, for this would turn public opinion against the Spanish government and so aid Franco.
    In short, so long as the communists put themselves at the head of the anti-fascist struggle, in the absence of effective competitors on the left or right, they could not but benefit from the situation. Paradoxically, as a party calling for economic transformation, they lacked this advantage. Since they deliberately moderated their anti-capitalist discourse in the interest of anti-fascist unity, they had plenty of competitors on the left ready todenounce them as traitors to revolution and class struggle. Since they were generally political minorities, other parties might be in a better position to benefit from the dramatic shift to the left which indeed, as Furet recognizes, was inseparable from the mobilization, and eventually the war, against fascism. In Britain it led to the triumph of the Labour Party, though their 1945 programme was extremely radical by the standards of the 1990s. ‘I was among those young army officers who in 1945 voted Labour,’ writes Lord Annan, never for a moment tempted by communism. ‘It was not that I did not admire Churchill – for me he was the saviour of our country – I doubted whether he understood what the country needed after the war.’ 3
    On the continent this mood was more likely to benefit communists than social democrats because the very nature of the wartime struggle against enemy occupation put social democrats at a disadvantage against communists. Democratic mass parties find it almost impossible to operate effectively when deprived of the political legality and the instrumentarium of public activities which is the air they breathe. Socialist parties were almost inevitably under-represented in resistance movements, whereas – for the opposite reasons – communists were disproportionately prominent in them. Where social-democratic parties had a firm mass basis, they could – as in Germany and to some extent in Austria – go into hibernation when legally suppressed, only to emerge again, their mass basis largely intact, when legality was restored, marginalizing their communist minority. Not so where the structure was looser, and where in effect a new postwar legality and legitimacy had to be established on the basis of – real or assumed – wartime resistance, as in France or Italy. (One cannot but note with some surprise that there is no discussion of resistance movements inany European country in Furet’s book, and indeed barely any mention of the word itself.) Let me now turn to another aspect of Furet’s theme, the relationship between the appeal of communism and the tradition of the French Revolution. That this is crucial in France, where the Revolution was part of the fabric of public life, is evident. Yet outside France, a preoccupation with the events of 1789–93 belonged to historians, to esoteric cultures such as those of revolutionary socialists, and to the nightmares of the Right. Of course, the Revolution in general terms was also part of the patrimony of the small