Stalin

CHAPTER 6 ON A BLUFF

The cause of Spain is not solely the cause of the Spaniards, but the cause of all progressive and advanced humanity.

STALIN, open telegram to José Díaz, published in Pravda, October 16, 1936, republished in Mundo Obrero, October 17

Stalin conducts a struggle on a totally different plane. He seeks to strike not at the ideas of an opponent, but at his skull.

TROTSKY, journal entry en route to Mexico on a Norwegian oil tanker, December 30, 1936 ¹

STALIN DEPARTED FOR SOCHI ON AUGUST 14, 1936, and would remain down south through October 25. His absences from Moscow since 1930 (this holiday included) averaged seventy-eight days per annum. His Sochi dacha was not in the town proper, but on a zigzagging road about a mile up and in from the Black Sea. North led to Sochi, south to the sulfur baths of Matsesta (farther on were Gagra and Sukhum, in Abkhazia). The pristine setting offered the smell of pine trees and salty air, while the compound contained guest villas, tennis courts (where Nadya used to play), and a detached billiards hall, all surrounded by NKVD troops. The main dacha was an unpretentious wooden structure with an open-air veranda that Stalin prized. Matsesta’s curative sulfur waters were now being pumped in, obviating the trip. The staff and guards equipped the residence with the usual pianolas and phonographs, but holidays were not downtime. While away from the capital in 1930, Stalin had remade the Soviet government structure, and the next year he reorganized management of foreign affairs. The 1936 southern holiday would prove to be his most momentous yet as he further radicalized his pursuit of Trotskyites with his most frenzied public trial to date and upended international politics with a military intervention on the Iberian Peninsula.

Spain had been Europe’s only major country to avoid the Great War, and the Second Spanish Republic, born in April 1931, bucked the authoritarian trend engulfing the continent. That year, amid a resounding Radical Republican Party victory in municipal elections, King Alfonso XIII, who had reigned since his birth, in 1886, fled abroad (without formal abdication), inspiring hopes among the country’s peasants and workers and fears among the propertied and the Church establishment. But the Republic had managed only timid land reform, while Spain’s few pockets of industry remained gripped by the Depression. A third of the population could neither read nor write, and more than half of its children had no access to education. The Cortes, Spain’s parliament, was roiled by raw, irreconcilable emotions—for and against the Church and the army, for and against socialism. A military coup in August 1932 had been foiled by a general strike, but it confirmed the army’s lack of loyalty to the Republic. Spain experienced wild electoral swings from left (1931) to right (1933) and back on February 18, 1936, when a leftist coalition known as the Popular Front defeated the ruling coalition of rightist parties (the National Front). A quirk in the election law magnified the Popular Front’s narrow victory and gave them a solid majority of 264 representatives—162 Left Republicans and independents, 88 Socialists, 14 Communists—versus 156 for the right and 54 for the center (including many Catalans and the Basques).² The Popular Front’s majority, moreover, stemmed from working-class parties, but the Socialists, Communists, and anarchists did not take government portfolios. At the same time, the Basques in the north and the Catalans in the northeast strove for autonomy, while the central government possessed no reliable provincial officialdom and was hard pressed to live up to soaring expectations for social reform. Some electoral fraud on behalf of the Popular Front also contributed to the instability. More vivid were sensational fables of “Red massacres” of clergy and landowners, mob actions, and rural unrest. The upshot was a cauldron of antigovernment conspiracies.³

Spain would be torn apart by a civil war during which the country of 25 million people would see 1.7 million fighters conscripted by the Republic and 1.2 million by the Nationalists, and up to 200,000 battlefield deaths, over the course of nearly three years of combat over class, religion, region, and governance. Perhaps as many as 49,000 civilians would perish in the Republic’s zone, where the leftists would perpetrate or indulge mob killings of “reactionaries” and “fascists.” How many civilians died in the Nationalists’ bombing of Republic-controlled cities remains unknown (perhaps 10,000), but the Nationalists would end up summarily executing some 130,000 people in a deliberate strategy of anticivilian terror.⁴ During the same period, Stalin would execute or cause the death of up to 1 million people, from a total population of close to 170 million. But the conspiracies in the Soviet Union were invented.

Some scholars have argued that events in Spain helped precipitate or at least radicalize Stalin’s domestic terror of 1936–38, which they portray as a sincere, if wildly excessive, attempt to eradicate suspected real and potential saboteurs lying in wait to assist externally launched aggression.⁵ But Stalin had decided in 1935 to reopen the Kirov murder case and instigate a new wave of arrests of “Trotskyites” around the country. On June 29, 1936—before any hint of Spain—Yagoda had reported to Stalin, Molotov, and Yezhov on “very important” interrogation testimony obtained from arrested “Trotskyites”: Yefim Dreitser, Trotsky’s former bodyguard; Richard Pikel, former head of Zinoviev’s secretariat; and Isaac Esterman. Stalin circulated the report to the politburo.⁶ Furious preparations were under way for a showcase trial (pokazatelnyi protess) involving these and other “Trotskyites” in Moscow. Spain would turn out to be important for Stalin’s mass bloodletting less as cause than as added rationalization.⁷

In the summer and early fall of 1936, the Soviet leader made no speeches; indeed, he did not even appear in public. He sat on his Sochi veranda, reading stacks of well-ordered secret documents, then dictated some telegrams to aides with him on the Black Sea coast, which technicians coded and relayed to Kaganovich in Moscow. Kaganovich, who had never finished elementary school and could not write grammatical Russian, in turn formulated Stalin’s instructions as politburo decrees, which he had coded and dispatched to the tens of thousands of party committees that existed in every single Soviet locality and factory, and a majority of collective and state farms. Comintern secretary general Dimitrov did the same for every Communist party in the world. This produced orchestrated mass meetings all across Eurasia and beyond, at which preselected speakers issued demands for execution, even before convictions had been pronounced, while others in attendance raised their hands in agreement. The Soviet press, in ideological lockstep, delivered saturation coverage to thousands of towns and tens of thousands of villages, whipping up intense hysteria. The power of Stalin’s regime—resting upon the telegraph, a tiny handful of aides, the Communist party machine, the secret police, the military, and the dream of a better world—was breathtaking.

While atop his bluff overlooking the Black Sea, 850 miles from Moscow, Stalin would also decide after much hesitation to intervene in the Spanish civil war.⁸ He ordered no strategic analyses of the pros and cons or formal policy-making discussions.⁹ He seems to have consulted next to no one. Molotov, head of the government, was himself on holiday (July 27–September 1, 1936). Mikoyan was in the United States (August–September) to study the food industry, with more than $600,000 in hard currency to acquire model machinery.¹⁰ When the intervention details were finalized, Orjonikidze, head of heavy industry, was on holiday (September 5–November 5).¹¹ To be sure, Kaganovich was in Moscow, and in frequent contact with Sochi (referring to Stalin as “our parent”). Voroshilov was also in the capital and communicated with Stalin on the high-frequency phone and by ciphered telegram. But the decision to take action in Spain, like the earlier reopening of the Kirov case and preparations for a grand trial of Trotskyites, was Stalin’s alone. We shall puzzle it out, including limits he imposed.¹² Soviet military hardware sent to Spain would be voluminous and state of the art, but Soviet personnel would never exceed 700 or so at any time, two thirds of them in lower-level positions: pilots, tank drivers, technicians. It was not Spain but Trotsky that riveted Stalin’s attention, including much of the attention he paid to Spain.

Never an optimist about revolution abroad, Stalin had nonetheless said that the critical ingredient was war, which Spain would have, making it a test of his own theory of geopolitics. The question of revolution in Spain also intensified his rivalry with his long-standing nemesis. Not long after King Alfonso’s flight, Trotsky had written an unsolicited letter (April 27, 1931) to the Soviet politburo advising that the fate of “the revolution” in Spain depended on whether a combat-capable and authoritative Communist party was formed there. He had also warned that worker-peasant defeat “would lead almost automatically to the establishment in Spain of a genuine fascism in the style of Mussolini.” Stalin had distributed the letter to the inner circle, writing on it, “I think this impudent and Menshevik charlatan citizen Trotsky should get a blow to the head from the Comintern executive committee. Let him know his place.”¹³

COLONIAL EXPERIENCE

Britain had acceded to French ambitions in Morocco in 1904, provided that weaker Spain retained control over the Moroccan territory directly opposite British-controlled Gibraltar, which was crucial to Britain’s dominant position in the Mediterranean. Francisco Franco y Bahamonde had arrived in Spanish Morocco in 1912 and cofounded a Spanish Legion there. (His counterpart, the French commander in North Africa, was Philippe Pétain.) A provincial like Stalin and Hitler, Franco had grown up in Spanish Galicia, where he was marinated in peasant pragmatism and bullied by his father. He was short in stature at five feet five inches (1.64 meters)—two inches shorter than Stalin and three than Hitler—and very slight, earning the nickname Cerillito (“Little Matchstick”). At age fourteen, unable to enroll at the Naval Academy, Franco had entered an infantry academy, where, in 1910, he graduated 251st in a class of 312. In quick succession, however, he would become Spain’s youngest captain, major, colonel, and general (the first in his graduating class), thanks to his exploits in colonial Morocco. In 1916, Franco took a bullet to the lower abdomen—a fraction of an inch in any direction and, like most soldiers with stomach wounds in Africa, he would have died. But after ten years of ruthless counterinsurgency, he secured the Moroccan ruler’s surrender, the deed that earned him a general’s rank at thirty-three, which made him the youngest general ever in the Spanish army and at the time the youngest in Europe. “My years in Africa live within me with indescribable force,” he would later tell a newspaper editor. “There was born the possibility of rescuing a Great Spain.”¹⁴

The man who would make Spain great again was a poor public speaker, with a high-pitched voice. In Morocco, he had come to detest the leftists back in Spain who, in his mind, failed to appreciate the grand colonial enterprise.¹⁵ In 1935, Franco was promoted to chief of staff in Madrid, and in February 1936, when elections brought to power the Popular Front, the general told a confidant it was a Trojan horse to smuggle Communism into Spain and offered his assistance to the defeated rightist prime minister, should the latter want to annul the vote.¹⁶ The Republic’s civilian president smelled a rat and reassigned Franco to the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast. In fact, Spain’s military was engaged in a plot. But Franco’s participation was not confirmed until the very eve of their putsch, and even then he voiced uncertainty. The prime mover in the coup was the Cuban-born general Emilio Mola. (Cuba had been a province of Spain.) The forty-eight-year-old Mola had recently been reassigned to a backwater with a small garrison to counteract his suspected plotting. His main accomplice was the sixty-four-year-old general José Sanjurjo, who, along with some 15,000 Spaniards (mostly monarchists and conservatives), was living under asylum in Portugal, courtesy of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship. Salazar ignored the Spanish Republic’s pleas to prevent Sanjurjo’s return, but on July 20, the latter’s small plane crashed en route: it seems the general’s clothes trunk was too heavy.¹⁷ Sanjurjo’s unexpected death elevated the forty-three-year-old Franco as Mola’s main partner and rival. “Franco,” Sanjurjo had warned, still bitter that during his 1932 coup the younger man had stood on the sidelines, “will do nothing to commit himself; he will always be in the shadows, because he is crafty [cuco].”¹⁸

Franco had flown from the Grand Canary—on a chartered British plane—to Morocco, where he rallied Spain’s best fighting force, the ruthless Army of Africa (5,000 men of the Spanish Foreign Legion, 17,000 Moorish troops, and 17,000 Spanish conscripts).¹⁹ On July 17, they rose up in the coordinated coup. But on the mainland, the Nationalists gained the support of only about half of the Territorial Army, some 60,000 soldiers. Garrisons in key industrial cities—Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao—refused to join the rebellion. But the military plotters would not accept defeat. Mola became the rebel Nationalist commander in the north, Franco in the south. Colonial experience could cut in very different ways: Gandhi had gone to South Africa and returned to British India with the idea of a Congress Party and peaceful protest; Franco, from Spanish Morocco, brought back brutal counterinsurgency. He and Mola enacted the savage political cleansing (limpieza) of Franco’s Moroccan colonial war—only this time against fellow Spaniards.²⁰ To induce Republic-held territory to surrender, Nationalist troops engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Women in the tens of thousands had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves. Men were just shot, especially if found in possession of a trade union card. All the while, Franco obsessed over supposed international conspiracies of Freemasons, Jews, Communists.

Spain had last experienced major armed conflict when resisting Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Catalonia used the military’s putsch to carry out its own regional coup d’état against rule by Madrid, splitting the resistance. In Barcelona, in what was christened the Catalan Generalitat, a newly formed Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia competed with anarchists to arm workers in resistance, while the Republic government in Madrid reluctantly armed workers. These new militias radicalized domestic politics—the very outcome that the military putsch was supposed to forestall. Worker syndicates seized factories, and farmers formed collectives or redistributed land to individuals.²¹ In the greatest twist, despite the weakness of Spain’s right-wing party, inspired by fascism, the Falange (Phalanx), and its Communist party—each possessed fewer than 30,000 members in July 1936—Spain became a battleground in the international struggle between fascism and Communism.²²

GREAT POWER MACHINATIONS

Spain and the Soviet Union were remote from each other (the USSR accounted for 0.9 percent of Spain’s trade in the first half of 1936).²³ The Spanish Republic maintained normal diplomatic relations with just about every country in the world except the Soviet Union, and the putsch had looked unlikely to alter any of that.²⁴ France ought to have been Spain’s natural partner, especially after the June 1936 formation of a Popular Front government in Paris, which included Communists as well as Socialists under Prime Minister Léon Blum. Spain’s Popular Front government had already appealed to France’s Popular Front for military aid by July 18, and got a positive initial response from Blum, but pro-Franco personnel in Spain’s embassy in Paris leaked the request to France’s right-wing press, which launched a vicious campaign against Blum (a Jew as well as a Socialist). On a visit to London, moreover, Blum discovered that Britain opposed helping Spain’s elected government.²⁵ Britain had a great deal at stake: it accounted for 40 percent of total foreign investment in Spain, including the Rio Tinto mining conglomerate. But Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought to avoid new government commitments, given the costs of maintaining the empire, or unwittingly facilitating a Communist takeover in Spain.²⁶ His stance was shared by even most of the Labour party and the trade union bosses.²⁷ Many British Catholics, meanwhile, admired General Franco’s stated program; much of British business sided with him as well. And so, on July 25, Blum reversed himself and agreed to join Britain’s policy of “non-intervention.” The hope was that the gambit would also take in Germany and Italy.²⁸

The Spanish putschists, however, themselves had appealed to Hitler and Mussolini. Franco, bereft of an air force, was cut off from the mainland, but his appeal to the German government failed. He had recourse to a second channel: German expatriates in Spanish Morocco. A nondescript German sales director at a trading firm (kitchen equipment) who was a member of the Nazi Party Abroad wanted to demonstrate his own importance and that of the fledgling organization, and he flew Franco’s emissaries to Berlin, using Nazi party channels to reach Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess on holiday at his country estate. On July 25, Hess, one of the few people to address Hitler with the familiar du, received the emissaries and phoned Hitler, who was at the summer Wagner Festival. Hess dispatched the Spaniards and Morocco-based Nazis by car to Bayreuth, and, following the conclusion of Siegfried, the group hand-delivered Franco’s request for military aid at the Wagner family residence. Hitler had shown no interest in supporting the coup before the generals had acted, and now seemed unsure—his own rearmament had a ways to go—but he launched a monologue and worked himself into a lather. (“If Spain really goes Communist, France in her present situation will also be Bolshevized in due course, and then Germany is finished.”) That very day, support for Franco against the “international Jewish revolutionary headquarters in Moscow” was assured.²⁹ Hitler consulted only the minions in his company and made the decision against their objections.³⁰ “We’re taking part a bit in Spain,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “Not clear. Who knows what it’s good for.”³¹

Hitler appears to have been in a fine mood that evening: the aid to Spain would be dubbed Operation Magic Fire. (“Magic fire” music accompanies Siegfried’s passage through the flames to liberate Brünnhilde.) The Führer even sent twice as many Junkers Ju 52 transport planes as Franco requested. Franco would have eventually gotten his troops over the Spanish Republic’s naval blockade to the mainland, but Nazi assistance accelerated that movement, struck at the Republic’s morale, and buttressed Franco’s standing vis-à-vis Mola. Franco had also approached Italy for support, on July 22, 1936, and the new Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law), was gung-ho. The duce had mocked the Spanish Republic as “not a revolution but a plagiarism,” and had been paying a small retainer to a leader of Spain’s fascist equivalents while vaguely promising support to any would-be putschists.³² Now, emboldened by reports of British acquiescence and French paralysis, he decided to provide substantial military assistance, without consulting his own military men. In parallel to his expansionism in Abyssinia, the duce dreamed of a still larger Italian Mediterranean empire at French expense, via a friendly government in Spain. He also derided Léon Blum as “one Jew who did not enjoy the gift of prophecy.”³³ Spain would push Italy still closer to Germany.

Spain would also push France and the Soviet Union further apart. The French brass feared that any military support for the Spanish Popular Front could ignite a pan-European war, which, overestimating the German military, they felt France was in no position to fight successfully.³⁴ More broadly, French ruling circles viewed reliance on the Soviets to stand up to Nazi Germany as a provocation toward Berlin and an invitation to ideological contagion. “If defeated,” the French foreign minister would note privately, France “would be Nazified. If victorious, it must, owing to the destruction of German power, submit, with the rest of Europe, to the overwhelming weight of the Slavic world, armed with the Communist flamethrower.”³⁵

FABRICATING A “UNITED” CENTER

Yagoda’s NKVD was rounding up “Trotskyites,” including in faraway Gulag camps. On June 19, 1936—again, well before the putsch in Spain—he and Vyshinsky had sent Stalin a list of eighty-two people accused of terrorism “links,” recommending that they be tried by the military collegium and executed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were included. Stalin instructed Yezhov to have the NKVD prepare a trial against a united Trotskyite-Zinovievite “center.”³⁶ On July 15, Yagoda sent a secret NKVD circular to every operative, severely criticizing the NKVD bosses in certain regions for “opportunistic kindheartedness, self-assurance, forgetfulness of old Chekist traditions, and inactivity” (i.e., failure to expose “Trotskyites”).³⁷ Stalin was insisting on a high-profile public trial, broadcast live, and Yezhov applied pressure so that people under arrest began to be re-interrogated to build a story line of a “united center.” Zinoviev, naïvely, had been writing groveling prison letters to Stalin asking for forgiveness; Kamenev had been trying to dissociate himself from Zinoviev.³⁸ In mid-July, the two were brought from prisons in the Urals to Moscow. Yezhov took part in their interrogations and appealed to their revolutionary patriotism, arguing that an international Trotskyite conspiracy in cahoots with Germany and Japan threatened the Soviet Union, and thus their confessions were necessary for the cause.

Zinoviev offered to comply if Stalin personally promised to spare him. Kamenev resisted (“You are observing Thermidor in pure form,” he said during interrogation). The two were taken to see “the politburo,” which turned out to be a meeting with Stalin and Voroshilov.³⁹ Stalin evidently flattered them, calling them comrades, followers of Lenin, whose cooperation was necessary to combat Trotsky.⁴⁰ No less germane was the fact that Kamenev had been informed that his son was under investigation. Kamenev and Zinoviev did begin to testify about their improbable plotting with Trotsky.⁴¹ On July 23, 1936, Yakov Agranov, who, together with Yezhov, had handled the original Kirov investigation case against the “Zinovievites,” personally re-interrogated the already imprisoned Dreitser (said to be the “head” of an underground “Trotskyite” organization) and Pikel, extracting the necessary “testimony” concerning a “united center.”⁴² On July 26, Stalin had the NKVD haul in Sokolnikov, who had once joined Zinoviev and Kamenev in questioning Stalin’s absolute power in the role of general secretary. On the night of July 27–28, the NKVD arrested the ex-wife of Yuri Pyatakov, Orjonikidze’s first deputy at heavy industry. Stalin’s anti-Trotsky drive had its own dynamic prior to events in Spain.

TRYING TO STEM REVOLUTION

Bereft of an ambassador in Madrid, Stalin had next to no information about what was going on, beyond reports via Comintern channels.⁴³ On July 23, 1936, at a Comintern executive committee meeting, Dimitrov emphasized the value of the Spanish conflict for rallying international forces to a global popular front, and begged Stalin for comments on draft theses.⁴⁴ Stalin wrote “correct” on Dimitrov’s instructions to the Spanish Communist party for restraint; on July 24, the secret orders went to Madrid for Spanish Communists “not to run ahead,” that is, to contain their struggle to supporting the “bourgeois democratic republic” rather than pushing for a dictatorship of the proletariat. Dimitrov did allow that “when our positions have strengthened, we can go further.”⁴⁵ By July 25 the Nazis and Italian fascists were already wielding the bogeyman of “Bolshevism” in Spain to justify supporting the putschists. That day, with Blum backing off his pledge to support Spain’s Republic, the Spanish prime minister, in a letter to the Soviet envoy in Paris, conveyed his government’s desire to purchase Soviet arms in quantity.⁴⁶ The Soviets did not reply. An Italian assessment out of Moscow on July 27 noted Soviet “embarrassment” over Spain and a likely pursuit of “prudent neutrality.”⁴⁷

Dimitrov was not received by Stalin during these days. Litvinov, who had recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday and received the Order of Lenin, was urging Stalin to maintain Soviet-French-Anglo “solidarity” by avoiding military aid to Spain’s besieged Republic. The foreign affairs commissar finally got in to see the dictator on July 28 (Molotov and Voroshilov were absent). (Not until August 7 would Stalin again summon anyone to the Kremlin office.)⁴⁸ The antifascist popular front strategy (Dimitrov) and “collective security” (Litvinov), once seen as in sync, were deeply at odds, given France’s position.

The Comintern executive committee was also discussing China—it aimed to rein in the Chinese Communists, who were not following the Comintern policy of cooperation with Chiang against the Japanese.⁴⁹ At the end of the Long March, Mao had arrived in Yan’an, in China’s northwest, where the Communists set up a ministate. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist (Guomindang) government, based in Nanking, wanted to isolate the Reds, a task he assigned to Zhang Xueliang, whom the Japanese had chased from Manchuria. Zhang had his headquarters in Xi’an, 200 miles north of Mao, and commanded a sprawling force of perhaps 300,000.Only in late June or early July 1936, after an almost two-year hiatus, was a radio link reestablished between Moscow and the Chinese Communists in the remote interior, and the Chinese comrades asked the Comintern to provide $3 million monthly to cover military expenses, help organize contributions from the Chinese diaspora, and send Soviet aircraft, artillery, antiaircraft artillery, infantry rifles, machine guns, and pontoons, through either Xinjiang or Mongolia.⁵⁰ But at the July 23 Comintern meeting, Dimitrov insisted that “the task in China right now consists not in expanding the regions under soviets and the Chinese Red Army, but . . . unification of the vast majority of the Chinese people against the Japanese invaders.” The goal was to “complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution,” although eventually, “in the process of this struggle, the moment will come for the mass organization of the struggle for Soviet power.”⁵¹

Four days later, Dimitrov submitted draft directives for the Chinese Communists to Stalin, who would take some time to return them. In the meantime, the Comintern directives to Spain’s Communists to avoid revolution arrived just as the Spanish Republic state began to melt away. Jails were being cracked open, court records ransacked, village rents pronounced null and void, and businesses collectivized. Spain’s moderate Socialists, together with Spain’s Communists, could not contain the workers, peasants, and anarchists in the Republic’s zone, especially in Catalonia, where 70 percent of industry would be collectivized in three heady months. “The first impression: armed workers, rifles on their shoulders, but wearing their civilian clothes,” Franz Borkenau, an Austrian writer who had quit the German Communist party in protest over Stalin’s rule and traveled to Spain, would observe. “And no ‘bourgeoisie’ whatever!”⁵²

To stand by while the leftist Popular Front and popular revolution in Spain went down to “fascist” armed aggression would threaten Moscow’s prestige. Sometime between July 27 and 29, 1936, the head of the Spanish Communist party sent a cipher responding in detail to Comintern questions about “the correlation of forces,” which Dimitrov forwarded immediately to Stalin. “The adversary has the advantage that he has many spies in the government camp,” the Spanish report concluded. “Despite that, if France will deliver the requested aid in the form of airplanes and ammunition, the adversary will be destroyed.”⁵³ Would Stalin step into the breach? A genuine leftist revolution was unfolding in Spain against his instructions, and the Chinese Communists were pressing revolution against orders as well. Rendering this situation still more maddening was the circumstance that he was being visibly outflanked on the left by Trotsky.

THE TROTSKY CHALLENGE

Stalin hated Trotsky with a deep, emotional, blind, wild hate; he also feared him, in a way he feared no one else. Trotsky had long been under nearly total NKVD surveillance, first on an island in Turkey and then in France. The NKVD knew of or had inspired a plan by the anti-Soviet émigré Russian All-Military Union to assassinate him in 1934, but operational amateurism produced nothing beyond recriminations.⁵⁴ In 1935, Trotsky had accepted an offer of asylum from the new Norwegian Labor Party government, taking up residence with his wife as guests of the journalist, painter, and parliamentarian Konrad Knudsen in Oslo, where the NKVD had few resources.⁵⁵ But Trotsky’s elder son, Lev Sedov, the nerve center of international Trotskyism (such as it was), had remained in Paris, where the Soviet secret police enjoyed a robust presence. Boris Atanasov, known as Afanasyev (b. 1902), an ethnic Bulgarian assassin and kidnapper who oversaw infiltration of émigré circles in Paris, had been tasked with penetration of Trotsky’s Paris operation.

Afanasyev stumbled upon an unbelievably valuable agent: Mordka “Mark” Zborowski (b. 1908), who had been born in a Jewish family in imperial Russia and, after the revolution, resettled in Poland, where he eventually joined the Polish Communists. After an arrest and short prison sentence, Zborowski fled to Berlin, then to Grenoble, where he attended university, and was recruited into the NKVD in Paris around 1933.⁵⁶ Zborowski befriended Sedov’s wife, who recommended him for the position of her husband’s secretary. “At present the source meets with the son nearly every day,” Zborowski’s secret police handler reported to Moscow, which responded that “we caution that you do not go too far and thereby destroy all our plans in this machination.”⁵⁷ The NKVD was able to install listening devices on the telephones in the apartments of Sedov and his collaborators. Zborowski also gained access to secret lists of, and correspondence with, trusted Trotsky loyalists worldwide, on the basis of which the NKVD compiled a card catalog. Zborowski, known to Sedov as Étienne, a fluent Russian speaker in an otherwise French-only milieu, took charge of Sedov’s correspondence and helped edit Trotsky’s Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition. Stalin, therefore, could read not only Trotsky’s mail but also drafts of his essays, sometimes before they were published.⁵⁸

Knowing what Trotsky would publish did not help counter it, however. Events in Spain afforded him a grand new platform from which to bash Stalin still more—as a counterrevolutionary who failed to support not a theoretical but an actual revolution under direct attack by “fascism.” On July 30, Trotsky, in high dudgeon, wrote that in “curbing the social revolution,” Spain’s Popular Front leaders “compel the workers and peasants to spill ten times as much of their own blood in a civil war. And to crown everything, these gentlemen expect to disarm the workers again after the victory and to force them to respect the sacred laws of private property.”⁵⁹ By that date, Nazi German planes had not only airlifted Franco’s africanistas to the Spanish mainland, but also begun strafing Madrid. Also on July 30, two of the initial Italian squadron of twelve Savoia-Marchetti medium bombers sent from Sardinia to Morocco to assist the Spanish insurgency had crash-landed in French Algeria, revealing Italian involvement.⁶⁰ The “fascists” had stolen the initiative. More than that even, with the Spanish Republic state dissolving, someone else could fill the vacuum. Stalin seemed to be facing a possibly victorious Trotskyism in Spain, where Trotsky was popular. The specter of Trotskyites capturing a physical redoubt in a real country would seize Stalin like the proverbial red cape in front of a bull.⁶¹

DICTATOR’S DILEMMA

Members of Stalin’s inner circle strove to circumscribe the expanding effects of his reopening of the Kirov murder case. Pravda, back on June 2, 1936, had published a speech by Pavel Postyshev, a candidate member of the politburo and party boss of Kiev province, upbraiding Ukrainian officials for unwarranted repressions; five days later, the newspaper editorialized (“Lessons of the Donbass”) that the coal plan fulfillment failures in Ukraine had resulted not from wrecking but from showy record-breaking labor stunts as well as the wrongful persecution of engineers.⁶² This was a prominent theme of Orjonikidze’s as well. “What kind of saboteurs?” he defiantly exclaimed at a multiday meeting of the guiding council of the heavy industry commissariat on June 25. “During the 19-year existence of Soviet power, we . . . have graduated more than 100,000 engineers and a similar number of technicians. If all of them, and the old-regime engineers as well, whom we have reeducated, turned out to be saboteurs in 1936, then congratulate yourself with such success. What kind of saboteurs! They are not saboteurs, but good people, our sons, our brothers, our comrades. . . . They will die on the front of Soviet power, if this is required. . . . It is not sabotage—this is nonsense—but incompetence.” Orjonikidze’s spirited defense elicited “rousing and prolonged applause.”⁶³

Orjonikidze worked long hours under phenomenal strain, which strained his weak heart. (One time when he suffered from heart palpitations he lost consciousness in his office, inducing his assistants to summon a doctor from the Kremlin hospital.) He also had just one kidney. Gossips said his wife, Zinaida, had a difficult personality, compounding his problems.⁶⁴ On June 29, the culmination of the heavy industry gathering, the commissar’s poor health had become visible for all to see. A foreign doctor was brought in to examine him.⁶⁵ Be that as it may, the key factor in exacerbating his health was his old friend and fellow Georgian, who was mercilessly, relentlessly driving the “saboteur” line. Kaganovich also did not see why manifestly loyal people needed to be arrested and executed. He had been defending top Ukrainian officials from Stalin’s wrath since famine days. But he knew Stalin all too well. In early July 1936, the dictator had sent Kaganovich—then vacationing in Kislovodsk—protocols of the Dreitser and Pikel “interrogations”; he took the unsubtle hint. “Although this was clear even earlier, they have now revealed the true bandit face of those murderers and provocateurs Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev,” he had responded to Stalin on July 6. “The main instigator of this gang is that venal scum Trotsky. It is time to declare him an outlaw and to execute the rest of the lowlifes we have in jail. Regards as ever, Yours, L. Kaganovich.”⁶⁶

Stalin pressed for wider arrests, using the unique instruments only he commanded: he dispatched a secret circular (July 29, 1936)—drafted by Yezhov and edited by the dictator—to party organizations, which was to be read aloud to all party members and which quoted the “testimony” of the various accused “Trotskyites.” “Confronted with the completely irrefutable successes of socialist construction, they initially hoped our party could not cope with the difficulties,” the circular stated. “But seeing that the party was successfully overcoming difficulties, they wagered on the defeat of Soviet power in a forthcoming war, as a result of which they dreamed of seizing power.” Then, “not seeing any prospects, in despair, they resorted to the last means of struggle—terror.” The circular explained that the “Trotskyites” had colluded in terror with Zinoviev and Kamenev and that, after the imprisonment of the latter, “Trotsky had taken upon himself all direction of terrorist activity in the USSR.” The document exhorted that “the essential mark of every Bolshevik in the current situation should be the ability to recognize and identify enemies of the party no matter how well they are able to disguise themselves.” But who were these hidden enemies?⁶⁷ How did the circular jibe with other signals conveyed by Postyshev and Orjonikidze in the authoritative Pravda?

NKVD operatives would “unmask” enemies to win raises, medals, and promotions; informants, queried about a “Trotskyite” underground, would become eager to please. Regional party officials, in order to protect themselves and their closest people, targeted as “Trotskyites” lower-level types as well as economic managers—precisely the people Orjonikidze sought to protect.⁶⁸ But Kaganovich, responsible for rail transport—which had been suffering an inordinate number of accidents, driven by underinvestment and overexploitation—expressly rejected assertions of Trotskyites in his bailiwick. On July 30, 1936, the day after the secret party circular on hidden enemies, he presided over the country’s inaugural all-Union Day of Transport, where, before 25,000 railway employees assembled at the outdoor Green Theater, in Gorky Park, as well as a Union-wide audience listening on radio, he delivered a two-hour oration on the daily loading of 81,214 freight cars, exceeding Stalin’s directive to reach 80,000. “Here the way is not purging and repression,” Kaganovich stated, noting the multitudes of railway workers who had received state awards. “No, for 99 percent of railway employees are honest people, who are committed to their work, who love their motherland.”⁶⁹ Soviet newspapers prominently published photographs of Kaganovich and Orjonikidze together that summer of 1936.⁷⁰

Multiple incentives impel dictators to try to convert their rule into despotism. Some lack the necessary means or personal traits to crush close allies. Stalin, of course, possessed both the wherewithal and the personality. But would he break Orjonikidze, Kaganovich, and other members of his innermost circle? Kaganovich was indispensable, still running the linchpin party apparatus in his absence, while Orjonikidze, no less vital, ran the critical heavy industry portfolio. Both of them removed a great burden from the far too burdened Stalin. At the same time, Orjonikidze’s Union-wide fiefdom afforded him a political base second only to the dictator’s. Izvestiya (still edited by Bukharin) did not shy from calling Orjonikidze “the people’s favorite,” the expression in Lenin’s purported Testament for Bukharin.⁷¹ In fact, Orjonikidze was more accessible, and in many quarters more genuinely popular, than Stalin. And he enjoyed extremely warm relations with other core members of the ruling group, including defense commissar Voroshilov, as well as Kaganovich.

IMPROVISING A COURSE

Stalin maintained his nonresponse to Madrid’s request for arms, but in the meantime the pressure to do something did not abate. On August 1, 1936—the opening day of the Summer Olympics in Nazi Berlin, not to mention the anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War—Izvestiya published an essay by Radek, which Stalin had approved, characterizing the civil war in Spain as part of a “meticulously” planned global aggression by “European fascists.”⁷² That same day, Pravda published Spanish reportage under the headline “Fascism Means War; Socialism Means Peace.” August 2 in Moscow brought a temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit (37.2 Celsius), the highest in fifty-seven years.⁷³ That day, Boris Pasternak met André Gide at his dacha in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino (where he had just moved in) and helped open the Frenchman’s eyes to Soviet realities; Pasternak also warned his NKVD minder that Gide was preparing a critical work on the USSR.⁷⁴ The next day, which was not a Soviet holiday, a reported throng of more than 100,000 demonstrators assembled on Red Square. Adorned in summer whites in the suffocating heat, the dense crowd listened to songs and speeches calling for defense of the Spanish Republic. Six tanned sportswomen, holding hands, led chants of “Down with Franco! Down with Franco!” “Our hearts are with those who at this moment are giving up their lives in the mountains and streets of Spain, defending the liberty of their people,” a female worker from the Red Dawn factory declared from the dais. “We say, ‘Remember, you are not alone. We are with you.’”⁷⁵

Soviet newspapers and radio placed Spain center stage, depicting Republic heroism against fascist aggression, and tying the Soviet Union to this cause.⁷⁶ Pravda—“Hands off the Spanish people!” . . . “Down with the fascist rebels and their German and Italian inspirers!”—reported that workers had been massed in front of the Winter Palace in Leningrad (100,000) and in Tashkent (100,000), Gorky (60,000), Rostov-on-Don (35,000), Minsk (30,000), Sverdlovsk (20,000), and Tiflis (10,000).⁷⁷ The Comintern resolved to “immediately undertake a wide campaign of solidarity for the fighters defending the Republic in Spain,” including “collections of medicines, foodstuffs, gold,” and enlistment of medical volunteers and purchases of ambulances.⁷⁸ The regime also announced “voluntary” deductions from workers’ paychecks for humanitarian assistance to Spain.⁷⁹ “We see how quickly fascists from different states will unite when the task is the asphyxiation of the working class,” one Soviet autoworker was quoted as stating in Pravda. “Through our relief aid . . . we will show the fascists that no country will be cut off from the workers of the rest of the world. The cause of Spain is our own cause.”⁸⁰

Would Stalin risk getting embroiled in foreign war? “A number of Soviet officials charged with the conduct of Soviet foreign relations were opposed to sending funds to Spain, since they felt that such action would be used by Italy and Germany to justify the aid given by themselves,” one Soviet official told the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow on August 3, 1936. “These objections were overruled, however, by the Soviet leaders who take the view that if the Soviet Union is to continue to maintain hegemony over the international revolutionary movement, it must not hesitate in periods of crisis to assume the leadership of that movement.”⁸¹ Tellingly, however, neither Stalin nor any of the members of the Soviet leadership attended the August 3 Moscow demonstration. Not even Comintern leaders were allowed to appear. The main speech was delivered by the head of the trade unions (Nikolai Shvernik), as if the process of gathering humanitarian aid were a spontaneous expression of worker solidarity.⁸²

All the while, the geopolitical maneuvering was fast and furious. In early August, France approached Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and other countries about a formal collective “Non-Intervention Agreement” for Spain.⁸³ Britain had treated a formal agreement guardedly, but now it decided it could drive a wedge between France and Spain. On August 3, the Italian government promised to study the matter. On August 5, the French chargé d’affaires in Moscow approached the foreign affairs commissariat, reporting that Britain had signed on and that Germany had agreed to do so if the Soviets would. Litvinov was on holiday, and one of his deputies, Krestinsky, advised Stalin, “We cannot either not give an affirmative response or give an evasive response, because then this will be used by the Germans and Italians, who will justify their further support for the insurgents by our refusal.” That evening, Krestinsky was able to reply that the USSR, too, would sign on, provided that not only Italy and Germany but Portugal’s dictatorship did so as well.⁸⁴ The next day, Italy confirmed its support in principle.