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PARTISAN REVIEW
Stalinists' keeps its relative strength and if the next election were held
under the proportional system, the Communist Party would lose very few
seats.
It is as a pointed attack against this apparent compactness that
David Rousset launched, on November 12, from the columns of the
Figaro Litteraire
a cogent appeal to all ex-inmates of Nazi concentra–
tion camps asking that they form an international commission to in–
quire into the existence and character of the Soviet
univers concentra–
tionaire.
The document was an impeccable piece of polemical writing.
It did not attempt to define the nature of the Soviet regime, it simply
said that there is evidence that slavery there has become an official state
institution and a mass phenomenon, the evidence consisting of the
Soviet "Code of Corrective Work" itself, and of a considerable number
of individual testimonies. Shunning all facile invective, Rousset spoke
in the name of his own experience as a deportee and addressed to all
those communists and non-communists who had undergone the misery
of the concentration camps one single question: Could they, knowing
that millions of human beings are now being subjected to the same
radical humiliation, remain silent?
Rousset's appeal was particularly well conceived in that it raised
only one specific question, that of concentration camps as a means of
state slavery, an institution that exists only in Soviet Russia and in
a less organic fonn in Malan's South Africa. Hence, the answer that
there is injustice everywhere, etc., was simply not in order. Catholic
fellow-traveler Martin Chauffier, an ex-inmate of Buchenwald, felt
compelled to give his support to Rousset. The National Federation of
Deportees, a Stalinist Front organization, was split. Judging from the
number of letters of encouragement that Rousset has received, a move–
ment is now building up which will probably reach the stage where an
international Commission will fonnally ask the Soviet government to be
allowed to investigate the existence of concentration camps in the USSR.
Whether the answer is an indignant refusal or an attempt to take a
few people on a guided tour, Rousset is sure of winning his case.
As for Stalinist answers to Rousset's appeal, they went like this: 1)
There is no such thing as a Soviet concentration camp
(L'Humanite);
2) Soviet concentration camps are the most refined instrument of
Socialist construction and of the liberation of man now in existence.
This was literally what Stalinist Pierre Daix, an ex-inmate of Mau–
thausen, wrote in
Lettres Franfaises
on November 17; 3) Those res–
ponsible for capitalist exploitation, the lynching of Negroes, war in In-
