The Institute of Social History, an antisocial organisation

A document that we will later quote describes the Institute of Social History as “an organization moved by a strong anticommunism that recycles Fascists” [Internet Source, «mémoire juive et éducation», “The destiny of 1019 nazi criminals and accomplices”, appears in an article by Georges Albertini quoted below]].

It was an invention of the employers’ organizations, exactly of the Worms bank, backbone of the synarchy, that had a massive financial support from the employers’ organizations, particularly from the president of the French National Employers’ Council that, in 1946, replaced the French Employers’ General Confederation , “metalworker” Georges Villiers, one of the delegates of the Forges Committee, master of France’s domestic and foreign policy like the synarchy-that-does-not-exist [1] and the Bank of France [2]. The employers included the invention, or the renovation rather, in the framework of an ideological offensive bigger than the Institute itself – an offensive that had begun right after the end of the Nazi occupation. Finally set up in March 1954, the “Institute of Social History and Sovietology” had been an “association founded in 1935 by Souvart, whose real name was Lifchitz Boris, known as Boris Souvarine” and presented as an “affiliate of the International Institute of Social History” of Amsterdam. In 1956, the institution was named Institute of Social History, its current name. [3] [RG stands for the French political police body known as the Renseignements généraux. Note of the translator].

This late (re)creation completes the diverse ideological activities that the Worms bank entrusted to Georges Albertini with the aim of moving the working class and French workers away from communism and also of trying to prevent them from being sympathetic to the USSR. For that, Hippolyte Worms hired, “since he was released” from prison [4] –in February 1948– former socialist and Marcel Déat’s right-hand, of whom he was a deputy in the RNP and staff director in the Labor Department (1944), Georges Albertini. The president of the bank, Hippolyte Worms, recycled the former RNP general secretary to give him the same anticommunist and anti-Soviet mission that he had done before the war and during the Nazi occupation. Georges Albertini had then taken charge of the publications direction, whose number tripled during the 1940s and also of other instruments of the class war whose denominations “economic and social” were so much appreciated by business owners since the times before war [5].

During the 1930s, the Worms bank had secured the services of Marcel Déat, who had left the SFIO during its 1933 division along with Renaudel and Marquet [6], and who was a synarch of the ideological category [7]. During the Nazi occupation, the bank had his services and also those of Georges Albertini as it was written in the almost authentic memories (in the archives of the police Prefecture) of Pierre Nicolle. Spokesman for the CGPF since early in the 1930s, supported by the Forges Committee (and particularly by Baron Petiet, treasurer of the CGPF, who sent him as a delegate to Vichy in July 1940), Nicolle was also at the service of different politicians such as Laval (of whom he was a right-hand during the Nazi occupation) [8]. The big synarchic bank also recycled Boris Souvarine, another character used before the war, a turncoat of the PCF – as usual – of which he was expelled in 1925. This former communist became an idol for the open anti-Bolshevik “left”, “extremist” or not. Jean-Louis Panné, his recent biographer, author of Boris Souvarine, le premier désenchanté du communisme, Paris, Robert Laffont 1993, shares that interest with Pierre Rigoulot, who for so long directed the Institute of Social History, was a member of its administrative council, “in charge of publications and research” and author, among other works, of the article “L’URSS en 1930 by Boris Souvarin”, published in Cahiers de l’IHS N.9. During the last two decades, confusion, turn into an academic issue, between Nazism and Communism, gave scientific legitimacy to any discoverer of the Soviet “horrors” about which Boris Souvarine was so prolix. However, his criticism against Soviet communism did not develop upon a “leftist” basis but in the framework of services rendered to the employers’ class and paid as such. Souvarine is a typical case of the period between the two wars, that of the turncoats of the PCF that the big business used after they left that organization (and sometimes even before they officially did). His case preceded other famous cases like that of Charles Vioud, who “in 1929” […] left] the Communist Party, to be immediately at the service of the employers” [9], and Jacques Doriot, whose undeniable talents were used by the right (with Laval ahead) and the employers before the official breaking off with the PCF [10]. The economic and social decisions made by these three turncoats had little to do with the reality of the USSR. It is impossible to blame the dissatisfaction for socialism and the disappointment of good-will men for certain operations that were nothing but the “purchase” of a representative of the dominated classes by one (or several) envoys of the ruling classes. Consulting police archives makes me be categorical.

Boris Souvarine

Boris Souvarine, buddy of Georges Albertini during the post war period, was contracted by the Worms Bank in the 1930s. Then, he was working in Les Nouveaux Cahiers, a two-monthly publication created in 1937 (its first number was published on March 15 of that year) by the synarchy to seduce, mainly after the electoral victory of the Popular Front, the anti-Bolshevik socialist and radical left [11]. After joining the magazine, Boris Souvarine’s leftist aura made him a star author of articles against Stalin’s USSR and the Spanish Republic, presented as a slave of the former [12]. Under the direction of the ideological boss of the synarchy, Jean Coutrot, Les Nouveaux Cahiers essentially depended, that is, in the financial aspect, on one of the true bosses of the synarchy, Jacques Barnaud, general director of the Worms bank. Organizer of the division of the CGT, just after its reunification (during the Congress of Toulouse, in March 1936), Barnaud acted in that unfamiliar field for bankers through René Belin (deputy and known successor of general secretary Leon Jouhaux), who financed the newspaper and the trend Syndicats created since the reunification. Synarch Emile Roche, a radical and director of the newspaper La République, and member of the France-Germany Committee since its creation in 1935, and Marcel Déat, were key instruments in the negotiations.
Barnaud became, Ander the regime of Vichy, one of the main chiefs of the occupied France while the Worms bank broke records in the field of economic collaboration (with the Nazi occupaying forces). Barnaud - writer of the law of August 16, 1940, about the organization committees and of the working charter of October 1941, and also the general delegate for French-German economic relations (until 1943) – was the real holder of the ministerial posts occupied by René Belin (between July 1940 and April 1942). After the liberation, he continued to be a key man in the Worms bank after having been one of the big names of a purge that never took place among the employers’ ranks (like his own employer, the very Hippolyte Worms) [13]... The “Soviet” specialization of Souvarine presents the question, to which I have found no answer in the archives of the RG, about the pre-war contribution of the Worms bank to the financing of the Institute of Social History, devoted to the same topics as the articles given to Les Nouveaux Cahiers.

Souvarine left France in 1940 and spent the war period in New York where he contacted the espionage services, then officially devoted to the war against the Axis (particularly the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecesor of the CIA). He did not return to France until 1947 [14]. The US works about the CIA contribution to the conquest of the intellectuals of Western Europe, through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) founded, alter a series of previous attempts, in June 1950, certainly give him less significance than to other turncoats of Communism. Among them, we can cite Arthur Koestler, agent of the British services since the war and of the Information Research Department (IRD), a service created for the anti-Soviet and anti-Communist crusade in February 1948 by the Foreign Office and his secretary, one of the leaders of the Labour Party and ex boss of the main British union federation, a fierce member of the crusade against the reds, Ernest Bevin [15]. It was then that Arthur Koestler established close ties with the CIA, an alliance that was strengthened during a long triumphal trip to the United States during which he met with the OSS boss, William Donovan (who worked in New York already as a CIA leader) and other personalities in Washington. For the Americans, Koestler then became one of the key characters of the Non Communist Left Policy. Between the OSS and the CIA (1945-1947), the State Department considered that it was effectively indispensable, in order to guarantee the US ideological and political hegemony over its European area of influence that had just ended with the German occupation, to use “democratic socialism” as an antidote in front of the radicalization of the peoples that emerged from the crisis and the war. In this necessary stage of transition towards the return to the pre-war formulas of the right [16], it was necessary, according to the espionage “agency”, to resort to the communist turncoats considering that “who could combat the communists better than a former communist?”
Although he was not such an important agent as Arthur Koestler, Boris Souvarine played his role.

Arthur Koestler

Peter Coleman, autor of a pioneering thesis about the Congress for Cultural Freedom, presented him as the usual author of the publications of that spoiled child of the CIA, that supported for almost 20 years. Souvarine, who was having a hard time in trying to find a publisher, like so many other anti-communist intellectuals without audience in the period between the Liberation and the late 1940s, was published thanks to the enormous publishing resources of the CCF. The story of that “Congress”, that fell within the context of the US’s tutelage over its “circle of influence” [17], is not over yet although it has significantly advanced thanks to works that increasingly audacious. [18]. The CCF, completely financed by the CIA, usually through cultural and nonprofit “foundations” (Farfield, Ford, Rockefeller, Kaplan, etc.), was officially directed by Michael Josselson, a former OSS member transferred to the CIA in 1948. Josselson (who continued to be a secret agent) presided over the US committee of the CCF, that is, the very CCF, since its foundation until it disappeared (under that appearance, after the scandal it caused, in 1967, the revelation that it was all a set-up by the CIA). Souvarine, one of the European anti-Bolsheviks protected by the CCF-CIA tandem, also wrote in Preuves, one of the numerous anti-communist magazines founded, in this case in March 1951, under the supposed aegis of the CCF, but actually under that of the CIA. Preuves received many anti-Bolshevik authors, including one of the heralds of the CCF, Raymond Aron [19].

It is clear that the anti-Bolshevik and pro-Nazi collaborator Georges Albertini did not need Boris Souvarine to get close to the Americans. In the context of its European economic program of expansion to the East, then limited due to the Soviet political and territorial victories of May 1945, the United States needed to lean on the best anti-communist and anti-Soviet specialists of previous decades [20], a line of conduct that is never described by those who try to put the communists and Nazis in the same basket. Like during the previous war, not under the effects of the Cold War, Washington decided, as soon as it entered World War II, to rebuild the Reich. It had had to face it when it began to take control of sectors of the US foreign trade, thus losing in that sense – particularly after 1934 – the commitment spirit. [21]. But that country (Germany), which had been a temporary enemy, had helped – mainly after its top speed rearmament – the US gigantic investments accumulated after the 1920s (several billion dollars) to bear fruit. That objective, excluding that it could change the socio-economic status quo that the Nazi era had preserved, aborted right away any serious “denazification” [22].

United States thus began recovery and recycling of war criminals in 1942 and 1943, that is, when it began to have German prisoners, offering its financial and operational assistance to the Vatican [23]]]. From that moment on, the United States became a lifejacket for all categories of collaborators [of Nazism], from industrialists and bankers (in that case since 1941-1942 [24] up to any kind useful individuals. As to th elatter, the following remark of the RG, dated April 1946, is a routine matter (and I formally say it after having read numerous nominal files of these services): “certain old elements of the National Popular Association, recently transferred to France, inform that Marcel Déat, after taking refuge in the Austrian Tirol, is currently in Rome, under the protection of US authorities. [...] Simon Sabiani, a former member of the Political Bureau of the French Popular Party, seems to be in the same situation and would be in charge of organizing Italian anti-communist groups.” [25]

Not because of the double effect – in spite of the current well established convictions – of a sudden worsening of Stalinism but because the “drift to the right” of the French domestic policy that was significantly influenced by the United States, the intellectuals of the right wing, those who were former leftists or those of anti-Bolshevik origin had in the 1940s the success they did not have after the Liberation. As we can not include here a detailed bibliography of that evolution, that characterized Western Europe in general, I will just refer to the works devoted to the CCF, which describe the intellectual aspects of the US expansion in Europe. Scott Lucas, more thoroughly than Irwin Wall, accurately analyzes its political links with the tutelage established by the United States over the “Marshall countries” (expression used by the State Department) [26]. The US trade union component of the work in which Boris Souvarine participated was as decisive, or even more, as the “cultural” dimension, including the very CCF, designated by the OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) of the CIA with the code QKOPERA. The Institute of Social History and the previous or associated French employers’ publications also enjoyed the financial support of the United States, officially coming from the “American trade unions” [27]. The main works about European and US syndicalism carried out by Anthony Carew [28], mine [29] as well as th ework of Frances Saunders about the CCF establish the complete mixture between the dollars “of the American trade unions” and those of the US State. The State Department intervened through the espionage services, that is, the OSS, later replaced after a transition stage (from September 1945 to July 1947) by the CIA, the latter created under the “law of national security” of July 26th, 1947. Irving Brown, emissary of the AFL, transferred from the OSS to the CIA and the brains behind the European trade union divisions of the postwar, beginning with those in France, was appointed member of the direction committee of the CCF, made up shortly after its founding conference in Berlin (June 24-29, 1950). Previously, he was nearly appointed as the head of the OPC, a post for which the fierce anti-communist and fervent pro-Nazi Frank Wisner was finally appointed. [30], another categorical denial for the promoters of the mixture between communism and Nazism.

After returning from France, Souvarine again began to serve the synarchics for which her had worked during the times of the Popular Front (Barnaud, Worms, etc.; Jean Coutrot was no longer there [31]). The activities of the Institute of Social History were affected by the double employers’ influence, the French and the American, that provoked the creation of anti-communist and anti-Soviet publications whose list we cite below. According to the RG, in January 1968, Boris Souvarine had just taken some steps to limit “the excessive influence that would gain, within the association, the American Sovietologists”. [32] The cited police file was written in the months that followed the enormous scandal provoked in April-May 1967 when the New York Times revealed that the CCF was a “creation” of the CIA... That scandal came after many others that emerged from the revelations of 1966, published in the same newspaper, about the “dirty works” carried out by the agency during the previous almost 20 years in Iran, Guatemala, Viet Nam (a country with which the United States was still at war), etc.
That revelation about the links with the CIA, whose crimes against democracy and against the expression of popular sovereignty had just been brought to light, denied the pretensions of the “cultural” organization to embody morality and freedom of expression of the intellectuals of the “free world” in contrast with the hell that the Soviet devil had for them. The devastating effect was amplified by a provocative article of the director of the CIA’s division of international organizations, Tom Braden, who affirmed on May 20th, 1967: “I am glad the CIA is immoral”. Braden had been subordinated to the OSS chief in Europe, and later in charge of the CIA (before he became its supreme boss, during the Eisenhower administration), Allen Dulles, brother and buddy of John Foster, of the “Dulles, Sullivan and Cromwell”, the most important US international business cabinet, closely linked to German finances.

Allen Dulles

After having run the CCF, under the direct control of Dulles, Bramen arrogantly vindicated the actions of the CIA in the Saturday Evening Post, particularly the financing of Force ouvrière and the cultural initiatives [33].
In this old and well known episode [34] Frances Saunders saw a strategic decision in abandoning the Non Communist Left Policy [35] : the American state had decided to give it up in the cultural field after 20 years, a long time after it sacrificed it, politically speaking [36], a temporary decision as we will see. Souvarine’s objective of reducing the visible number of American Sovietologists within the Institute of Social History probably has to do (although the RG file does not specify) with the agitation caused by the liquidation of the CCF.

However, the good French-American relations remained within this mechanism of the trade union and cultural cold war. A new generation came after the old one and the abandonment of the CCF was followed by a marked US support to the anti-communist left, an effort that would be more successful than during the last two decades after the postwar. [37]. Jean-François Revel, president of the Institute of Social History after 1998 [38], was being trained in 1992 by “historian-writer” Rémi Kauffer as a herald of the intellectual anti-Bolshevism, “ill-treated” […] by the pro-communist intelligentsia”. History seemed to repeat itself after the mid 1970s. “The US version of […] La tentation totalitaire”, a work of 1976 “whose title does not need any explanation”, had been a fiasco, “as the leftist intellectuals of the other side of the Atlantic were very influenced by Maoist hopes.

Jean-François Revel

Revel knew “a little” about the renowned CIA agent and mastermind of the African and European divisions of the postwar. Since when? What for? R. Kauffer does not clarify – “he entrusted his reserves to Brown. And the trade union leader immediately was enraged. His friends of the AFL-CIO then took over the US tour of the French writer. The author of Neither Marx, nor Jesus then spoke in front of an unusual audience: the US trade union leaders and activists. Delighted by the experience, he became a friend of the AFL-CIO representative in Paris. [39]

Consequently, after having known “a little” and having received an enormous support from someone he almost did not know, Revel received a significant financial assistance for his publishing success. It is as if we were reading Frances Saunders again about the luxurious tours, after 1950, of European and American anti-Bolshevik intellectuals of the CCF, tours that were financed by astronomical sums of money; or about their usual life, that of the luxury facilities. CIA guests did not even have to pay the bill in restaurants as, when they took out their wallets, the agents would tell them: “No, don’t worry! This is on the American taxpayers!” [40] But it was an incomplete statement as the American taxpayer also paid, and a lot [41].

In other words, the CIA maintained its privileged relations with the Institute of Social History, R. Kauffer wrote in 1992 before joining the Institute and warned the readers of the magazine about the “red intellectual terrorism from 1945 to our days” [42]. Along with Roger Faligot, in the past, Kaufer partially devoted two works to the recycling of pro-Nazi collaborators by big businesspeople, who immediately put them at the head of their own anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda organizations, and to the US funding of such activities.: Les résistants. De la guerre de l’ombre aux allées du pouvoir, 1944-1989 [43] and Éminences grises [44]. Both works are very well documented in spite of some errors, including the “myth of the synarchy” and the circumstances of the meeting between Georges Albertini and Hippolyte Worms when both of them were in the penitentiary of Fresnes during the fall of 1944 [45]. Kauffer and Faligot described the continuity of an ideological activity by the employers directly linked to the effort to reduce the salaries without yielding to the impulses about love for “freedom” that those efforts would inspire. In the past, Kauffer was also interested in:
First: the US funding of French trade unions, specifically of the minority faction of the CGT that transformed into the Force ouvrière (with an associated day’s pay) after the fall of 1945, preparatory stage of the division of the Confederation in November 1947 (it all had a lot to do with the active Irving Brown and with his endless rolls of dollars [46], spent with an indecency and an excess that was noted by all specialists [47]);

Second: The contribution of the Vatican (and that of its agent, French Cardinal Tisserant, secretary of the Congregation for Propaganda, to the reconstruction of the French right) to the escape, rescue and recycling of war criminals [48].