Yvan Craipeau

Who was Yvan Craipeau?

Yvan Craipeau was a French Trotskyist activist.

Born in La Roche-sur-Yon, he helped found a local independent Marxist organisation while still in his teens. Expelled from school, he moved to Paris and became associated with the Trotskyist group around La Verité. In 1930 this group founded the Communist League. This considered itself an external faction of the Communist Party of France, and as such it only admitted current and former PCF members. However, this rule was relaxed and Craipeau was allowed to join in 1931. He joined the League's executive committee with responsibility for developing a youth wing.

By 1933, he was able to organise a meeting attended by one thousand members of the youth wings of the Communist Party and the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière. During 1933, he was Trotsky's personal secretary.

In 1936, Craipeau became a leading member of the new Internationalist Workers Party. The following year, in reaction to Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, he began a re-analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union. He concluded that it could not be defended, as Trotsky held, as a degenerated workers' state, but that it was a bureaucratic collectivist system - an idea he introduced to Trotskyism.