Affaire Kravchenko
( Guerre froide à Paris )

Bernard George
2008 - 52 min - Beta digital - Couleur - France

Paris, January 1949. Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko's libel suit against the French communist weekly, Les Lettres françaises, became the “trial of the century". In a courtroom packed with journalists, Kravchenko called on witnesses who spoke for the first time about the famine in Ukraine, the purges, and, 15 years before Solzhenitsyn, the hell of the Soviet gulag. Opposite him, the Moscow-supported paper brought in witnesses and intellectuals, who in battle order, fiercely denied the evidence. For three months, as the world looked on, the courtroom was a theater of cold war: the gulag vs. the radiant future of the proletariat, human experiences vs. official speeches, facts vs. ideology. What insidious mechanisms force one to remain blind to the truth ?