Son of a small industrialist, Jean Elleinstein had to cross the demarcation line in 1941 and live illegally until 1944 when he joined the Milices Patriotiques (Patriotic Militia) in Megève.
A little marginal in the party, but strongly supported by Roland Leroy,[3] Elleinstein used a freedom of tone that brought him closer to the Italian or Spanish communists.
Appointed deputy director of the Center for Marxist Studies and Research, between 1972 and 1975 he published a 4-volume history of the Soviet Union (Histoire de l'URSS) in which he diverted substantially from the orthodox version that had been expressed since 1945 by Jean Bruhat.
Further exploiting his freedom to speake, in 1975 Elleinstein published History of the Stalinist phenomenon in which he analyzes Stalinism as the unfortunate product of historical circumstances.
Ellerstein became the non-official spokesman for a communism now redefined to be democratic and revised, with his book, Le PC, (the French Communist Party), and his Open Letter to the French people about a reformed republic based on the Programme commun,[a] Following the failure of the Union of the Left in 1977 and the rapprochement of PCF leader Georges Marchais with Brezhnev, and especially in view of Ellerstein's regular contributions to Le Figaro Magazine, by the second half of 1980, the conventional wisdom among upper echelons of the PCF was "that he had ejected himself from the party" and that there was therefore no need to eject him formally.