The Plane to Moscow

The green C-47 from Moscow circled above Paris' Orly Field, showing the bright red stars on its fuselage as it turned, then came in for a landing. Half an hour later, an ambulance drove up, opened its doors. From the ambulance Maurice Thorez, France's Communist boss, reclining on a litter, his feet in bedroom slippers, was carried to the aircraft to start what may be his final pilgrimage to Moscow. He said goodbyes to the bigwigs of French Communism: Jacques Duclos, looking like the tubby mayor of a little French town; Andre Marty, his fanatic face wearing an uncommonly benign look; hard-boiled Red Labor Chief Benoit Frachon in a green raincoat.

A dozen weighty trunks were hefted aboard the plane. No one inspected them; the French government had waived customs formalities. Then the Thorez litter was passed in, the white curtains were drawn and Maurice Thorez crossed into a world that outsiders are not allowed to glimpse.

Paris Said O.K. Harddriving, 50-year-old Maurice Thorez was a very sick man. In the month since he was struck down by a cerebral hemorrhage he had lain bedridden and partially paralyzed in his party-owned villa near Paris. He had frequent spells during which he blacked out. Five French specialists had agreed that Thorez seemed incurable and would probably never regain full possession of his faculties.

Moscow had sent Professor Sergei Davidenkov to attend Stalin's "very dear Comrade Thorez." Davidenkov disagreed with the French doctors, said that he would personally guarantee a cure in a Moscow clinic. Thorez' wife, Communist Deputy Jeannette Vermeersch, took the hint and publicly asked the Soviet to treat her husband. The Red Foreign Ministry made the request official, the French government agreed and Thorez was off. *

The Kremlin could congratulate itself on a delicate job, well--if brusquely--handled. It had reason to worry about Comrade Thorez. Long before the world heard of Titoism, the French party chief was quarreling with colleagues who accused him of harboring patriotic relics in his thinking. Thorez made unorthodox statements such as "One thing happened in Russia, another will happen in France. We'll have our French revolution in our own French fashion." Three times Thorez had been slapped down by the Kremlin for nationalist tendencies. Each time he took his reprimand like a good Kremlin offspring, welcoming the blows, enthusiastically agreeing that they were for his own good.

It would not be safe to leave a bedridden Thorez in France. He could not easily be hidden underground if the French government decided to arrest the Red leaders. A sick man whose brain or nervous system was affected might talk. He had to be whisked out of the country.

The Kremlin Said No. This raised the question of his successor as secretary general of the 700,000-member party. The rat-race for power began as soon as the underlings realized the extent of the chief's illness. The faction urging a tough Communist line pushed their senior member, Andre Marty. But though Marty is a reliable fanatic, he is an inflexible fool save in his specialty: barricade-building and street fighting. Auguste Lecoeur, one of the party's four secretaries, emerged as the compromise choice. Though a graceless militant, he was Thorez' protege and, like Thorez, had come up through mine-union politics. But the last word, of course, was Moscow's.

Last week it was spoken. The Kremlin definitely turned down Lecoeur: i) he had no training in Moscow, 2) the times required a wily, subtle, flexible approach rather than militancy alone.

Into Thorez' place went Jacques Duclos, shrewdly jovial, a skilled parliamentarian. Duclos, leader of the Red deputies in the chamber, could be hard as nails--as he proved when he headed the Red underground during the Nazi occupation. Or--and this is particularly important now--he could be as smoothly persuasive as an insurance salesman.

For fledgling Lecoeur, 39 years old, came a summons. Last week, when the Thorez plane took off, it carried an extra passenger. Ruddy-faced Auguste Lecoeur was off to Moscow for the soul-searing and trial by fire that precedes leadership of Communism's fifth column in France.

* Also seriously ailing, Italy's Communist Chief Palmiro Togliatti last week left Rome's Salus Hospital after a twelve-day stay for a brain operation, headed north for a rest. Notably, Moscow sent no flowers, no words of sympathy. In the well-ordered world of Communist protocol, such silence reverberates like an explosion. But only the rashest observers predicted a change in the leadership or policies of Italy's 2,500,000-member Communist Party, largest in the West.

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