Un procès du Goulag au temps du Goulag ?
L’affaire Kravchenko (1949)
Liora Israël
The Kravchenko case today can be seen as an essential
phase in the denunciation of Soviet regime crimes. This article reviews the
details of the 1949 trial that opposed Kravchenko, a Ukrainian renegade, and
the Communist weekly Les Lettres françaises that had launched a vilification
campaign against him. The legal specificities of the charge of slander as well
as the framework of a Paris criminal court in 1949 imposed particular constraints on the adversaries, whose respective goals – far over and above
slander – was a denunciation of Soviet crimes and a condemnation of anti-Sovietism. Lawyers played a decisive role in the interweaving of arguments
capable of supporting these opposing viewpoints at the height of the Cold
War. This trial, of which the political and ideological stakes were instantly
clear to the protagonists of the time, is an atypical and fascinating example of
the complex relations that can be woven between justice and severe crises.
• Un simple procès en diffamation ? Des contraintes juridiques restrictives
— Qui accusait qui ? Et de quoi ?
— Une stratégie judiciaire orientée par la diffamation
• La construction du procès
— Anticipations et stratégies de présentation des parties : le rôle des témoins
— La construction d’argumentaires utilisables lors du procès
— Mises en équivalence et construction narrative dans le procès