Annie Kriegel

Annie Kriegel, née Annie Becker (9 September 1926 – 26 August 1995) was a French historian, a leading expert on communist studies and the history of Communism, a cofounder (1982) of the academic journal Communisme (with Stéphane Courtois), and a columnist for Le Figaro.

Kriegel joined the French Communist Party (PCF) as a student in 1945 and remained a member until 1957.

From October 1951 to December 1953 she was a member of the federal bureau of PCF and from 1952 headed the section of education and ideological combat.

She lost her position after siding with Pablo Picasso whose portrait of Joseph Stalin was criticised inside the party.

From 1954 she pursued research on the Communist movement in France at Sorbonne under the direction of Ernest Labrousse, which resulted in two theses: Aux origines du communisme français 1914-1920 (defended 1964) and La croissance de la CGT 1918-1921, essai statistique (published 1966).

She shifted from her background in history towards a sociological approach in the process.

She changed her political views following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism in On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences (1956) and became an outspoken anticommunist.

From 1962 she wrote articles on Eastern Europe and Communism for France observateur under the pseudonyms Stanislas Ligier and David Ellimer at the invitation of François Furet.

In 1964, she joined the University of Reims, a former Catholic institution abolished in 1793, which was being re-established at the time, then took up the first chair in political sociology at the Paris Nanterre University in 1969, where she remained until her retirement in 1992.

Between 1967 and 1970 she published in the bi-monthly Quinzaine littéraire linked to the anti-Stalinist Left.

In 1970 she began writing for Le Figaro at the invitation of Raymond Aron whom she replaced as editor in 1977 after becoming a regular columnist in 1976.

She collaborated with Donald Blackmer, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency-funded think-tank MIT Center for International Studies, in producing two volumes on the French and Italian Communist Parties in 1975.

In 1979, she contributed alongside Jacques Soustelle, Lord Chalfont, Brian Crozier, Scoop Jackson, Jack Kemp, Richard Pipes, Norman Podhoretz and the then director of the CIA George H. W. Bush to the first of the two conferences on terrorism organised by Benjamin Netanyahu's Yonatan Netanyahu Anti-Terror Institute, which laid the intellectual groundwork for the War on Terror.

The journal Communisme, founded with Stéphane Courtois in 1982, was an extension of her seminar on the subject at Nanterre.

In 1990, she attacked the Gayssot Act, which criminalised Holocaust denial, as “legitimising an unbearable Jewish thought police”.

Her brother was the historian Jean-Jacques Becker, and she was married to Arthur Kriegel, a brother of Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont.

The Association Annie Kriegel, of which Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie was the first president and Stéphane Courtois the secretary-general, is named in her honour.

It was founded with the aim of supporting social science research in 2000 in Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme.

The Association for the Memory of Past and Present Crimes of Communism (Association pour la mémoire des crimes historiques et actuels du communisme) was founded in 2012 in Villedieu-sur-Indre with the aim of continuing the work of Annie Kriegel and Stéphane Courtois by “publicising the reality of different Communist regimes since 1917”, including “the present dictatorships of China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba”.