Monday 18 December 2000 Modernising French Communist confronts Soviet past ==================================== PARIS: French Communist leader Robert Hue gave a landmark speech denouncing his party's Soviet past on Saturday, just before a futuristic rave party intended to enhance the party's appeal to the young on its 80th anniversary. Confronting the French Communists' embarrassing Stalinist history more directly than ever, Hue admitted that the movement had closed its eyes to oppression while toeing the line of the Soviet Communist model. "We know what monstrous blindness to the terrible realities, perfectly antagonistic to the Communist ideal, this conception has brought," Hue said. Hue said the French Communist Party had in the past strayed from its true values by identifying too closely with the Russian experience. There had been "the very heavy consequence, in the context of a terrifying global confrontation between Communism and capitalism, of throwing the parties identifying with the second into obeying Stalinist dogma". "So this imposed a conception of Communist parties, making them instruments of an international Communist movement at the heart of which was the obligation to recognise the Soviet model," he said. "It must be said, the French Communist Party was the not the least zealous in going along with this conception," he said. Party sources said the speech marked a turning point in efforts to exorcise Stalinist ghosts lingering from the decades when the party slavishly supported the former Soviet Union's foreign policy even as other European Communists turned away. Memories persist of the party's support for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the "Prague Spring" of 1968. Hue's predecessor, Georges Marchais, went on television to defend the Red Army's invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. Faced with three decades of declining support, Hue fired a "modernise-or-die" warning at his party in March, convincing militants to adopt a plan to refresh its image and seek support from the young, women and immigrants. Crowning the party's anniversary celebrations, activists organised a disco in its imposing Paris headquarters -- once nicknamed "Le Bunker" -- adopting the theme "Marx Attacks" with a flying saucer motif. Hue's modernisation drive has drawn scorn from hardliners who say the party's place in a coalition with the ruling Socialists and Green party has diluted its ideals. Hue said he was committed to transforming the Communist Party into a force that would put power back in the hands of citizens and look further than capitalism. "It is this desire that give sense to our modern Communist ambition of going beyond capitalism -- and not just adapting it -- to set ourselves free," he said. Once a major force in French politics, the Communist Party won one-fourth of votes in the early 1970s but garnered under seven percent in European Parliament elections last year. (Reuters) For reprint rights:Times Syndication Service Copyright � 2000 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved. Disclaimer
