AND WORLD WAR II Medvedev, deals

only brietly with Stalin's postwar policy, which was based, in the first place, on the agreements made with the British and American governments for a division of Europe into spheres of influence made at the conferences of Yalta and Potsdam.

In the former, it was Stalin who imposed the policy of support for General de Gaulle which was carried out by Communist Party secretary Maurice Thorez on his return to France from the Soviet Union, while Palmiro Togliatti called • on the Italian CP to support the Badoglio governMedvedev's treatment of the French situation in 1944-1945 suffers from his non-revolutionary approach. He thinks that the National Front of the Resistance could have taken power after the liberation of Paris with the Communist Party in the bably under the presidency of de Gaulle.

He says:

"The whole situationincluding the presence of the Anglo-American forces and the rapid revival of bourgeois parties and newspapers and of private industry—made it impossible for the communists to destroy the coalition and rule by themselves.' In fact the Communist Party played a definite counterrevolutionary role in 1944 1945 in which it set qut quite deliberately to re-establish the bourgeois state and permit the discredited and debile French ruling class to preserve or regain its property. The rapid revival of private industry-and the bourgeois press - was made possible by the policy of the Communist Party. Where the working class went into action, it held it back.

It disarmed the partisan formations which it controlled and amalgamated many of them into the regular army and the police (including later the notorious strike-breaking CRS -Compagnies Republicains de Sécurité-which in Marseilles was composed at first largely of Communist Party members and supporters) under the slogan 'one army, one police, of the Fourth Republic.

There can be no analysis of the French situation which does not begin from that point. It was not just a question of elections, as Medvedev believes, but whether the working class was to be mobilized or not. The Communist Party enlisted it on behalf of the bourgeoisie and entered the government to safeguard capitalist private property. "The strike' Thorez cried, 'is an arm of the trusts.' With all the difference in the Greek situation the role of the Stalinists was the same. Stalin had agreed with Churchill that Greece was in the

tries like Indonesia and India to put pressure. on bourgeoisle as an instrument of Soviet foreign policy.

The implication of Medvedev's position is that the Soviet Union should have pursued a more conciliatory policy not only towards the national bourgeoisie, but also towards the imperialists. He criticizes not 'peaceful co-existence' as betrayal of revolution, but the alleged abandonment of Another Communist