From The Communist Trail in America by Jacob Spolansky, 1951

. . . In April, 1945, Stalin’s ax fell on Browder. The executioner chosen for the job was one Jacques Duclos, formerly a member of the presidium of the Communist International, and presently secretary of the French Communist Party.

It is, of course, awkward for all Communist instructions and directives to emanate from Moscow itself. By having the order come from a more western city, Paris, the Kremlin stigma was made less noticeable.

In a series of “instructions” published in the official organ of the Communist Party of France in April of 1945, Duclos jolted the Communist world by pointing a prosecutor’s accusing finger at the unsuspecting Browder. With electrifying fury he blasted Browder for dissolving the Communist Party of the United States and forming the Communist Political Association. “Heresy, “ “Treason,” Traitor” were among the curses spattered in Browder’s face.

The fact that Browder had done these things on specific orders from Moscow itself was of no concern to anyone. Sparing no prose in his denunciation of the servile Kansan, Duclos made his indictment in the strongest language.

Browder’s crimes, listed for all the Communist world to see, included his failure to interpret properly the Teheran conference, his inept understanding of Marxist theory, and the fact that he “lost sight of several of the most fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism.”

The Teheran declaration, according to Duclos, was merely a “document of a diplomatic nature.” Surely he reasoned, only a fool would take its import seriously enough to apply to the political platform of the Communist Party.

Although the Duclos letter was seemingly an original thought, it was actually put into the French Communists’ hands by D. Z. Manuilsky. The utmost pains were taken, in the light of Moscow’s own action in seemingly outlawing the Communist International, to remove the slightest taint of the Soviet’s string-pulling.

. . .

William Z. Foster, the Comrade who had lauded Browder at the convention only eleven months previously, the devoted friend for more than a quarter of a century, lost no time in writing to Duclos, “Me, too!” So it was no surprise to anyone that, in August of 1945, the convention of the American Communists installed William Z. Foster s head of the Communist Party of the United States.

Browder’s fate was unimportant. The main objective — to tell every Communist in the world that the honeymoon with the capitalistic world was over — had been accomplished by the Duclos bombshell.

This, then, was the overture to the “cold war,” the beginning of the tense relations between the United States and Russia. Moscow had pressed its buzzer in the form of the Duclos letter; the faithful would do the rest.

Foster, too, has been rudely removed from the front ranks. Etc.

New York : Macmillan, 1951, pages 97 – 99.