Stalin

Also on August 5, Trotsky, from Norway, sent his French and American publishers a manuscript that he had completed with only a little more than half a year’s work: The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? He sent a copy to his son Sedov in Paris for excerpting in the Bulletin. Thus did Soviet intelligence obtain a copy, while reporting that the text was to be translated into multiple foreign languages, which meant worldwide impact.⁸⁵ When Stalin saw the text remains uncertain, but it was likely not long after it had come into NKVD hands.⁸⁶ There is no known record of his reaction. Still, Trotsky’s spirited wielding of Marxist analysis against the purported leader of world Marxists struck at the foundations of Stalin’s legitimacy and self-identity. He portrayed Stalin’s rule as a full-blown counterrevolution, or Thermidor, a consequence of an evil social compact between the new bureaucratic elite and the old bourgeoisie, a deformation of Leninism pejoratively labeled “Stalinism.” Notwithstanding the building of socialism, therefore, the revolution had been betrayed.⁸⁷ Trotsky’s analysis appeared with impeccable timing: Spain could be taken as proof of Stalin’s betrayal of the entire world revolution. The book reinforced the convergence of the Trotsky problem and the Spanish problem.

FARCE

Preparations proceeded for a public trial in Moscow of “Trotskyites.” On August 7, 1936, USSR procurator general Vyshinsky sent Stalin a draft indictment charging twelve people with establishing a terror organization aiming to assassinate the dictator and other members of the leadership. Stalin raised the number of defendants to sixteen, five of whom were Germans—members of the German Communist party who had fled to the USSR—thereby reinforcing his beloved foreign espionage story line. He also sharpened the “testimony” he received of the fabricated plot. “It is not enough to cut down the oak,” he inserted in the testimony of one alleged would-be assassin. “You must cut down all the young that grow around the oak.”⁸⁸

The French Communist party had sent a reconnaissance delegation to Spain and, also on August 7, reported that “the situation is very critical because of non-availability of armaments,” a conclusion confirmed by Soviet military intelligence. Comintern HQ in Moscow telegrammed Maurice Thorez, head of the French Communists, to pressure the French government to rescue the Spanish Republic and thereby the French Popular Front (and, perhaps, the USSR from having to intervene in Spain).⁸⁹ That same day, Krestinsky explained in a telegram to the Soviet envoy in Rome that “we understood Italy and Germany would continue arming the putschists” in Spain, but the USSR had to remove any justification for them to do so.⁹⁰ On August 10, the expression “malevolent neutrality,” coined by Labour peer Lord Strabolgi in reference to British policy on Spain, appeared in the Daily Herald, the world’s bestselling newspaper.

Stalin had little desire to follow in Britain’s ignominious wake while being shown up by Mussolini and Hitler, cold-shouldered by the French Socialist Léon Blum, and squeezed between a whining Litvinov and a lacerating Trotsky. But if he rejected the Non-Intervention Agreement, Britain and France might unite with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany against the USSR in a four-power deal over Spain, and perhaps more broadly. (The British cabinet secretary had privately stated on July 20, 1936, “In the present state of Europe, with France and Spain menaced by Bolshevism, it is not inconceivable that before long it might pay us to throw in our lot with Germany and Italy.”)⁹¹ There was also, as ever, the commercial aspect. On August 19, Litvinov would write to the Soviet envoy Surits that Kandelaki, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, would “inform the Germans about our demurral on the [credit] agreement so far. At the same time, he was authorized to ask if the Germans were agreed to selling us certain items that specially interest us and, if so, raise the question of a credit agreement anew.”⁹²

Nazi Germany, as Berlin’s authoritative Institute for Business Cycle Research had recently noted in a report, faced depleted stocks of raw materials, which would seem to have argued for rapprochement with both the USSR and the Western powers.⁹³ But the Führer had other ideas, finalizing a Four-Year Plan in August 1936—one of the very few documents in Hitler’s own hand—which began with a statement about history being a struggle among nations for existence. It insisted that Germany had to be ready for war within four years; otherwise, “those strata of mankind which have hitherto provided the leadership” would suffer “replacement by worldwide Jewry.” Hitler added that “a victory of Bolshevism over Germany would lead . . . to the final destruction, indeed to the annihilation of the German people. . . . In the face of the necessity of defense against this danger, all other considerations must recede into the background as being completely irrelevant.”⁹⁴ Soviet intelligence had obtained information that Germany would not be ready to launch a massive-scale war before 1939.⁹⁵ Still, as Hitler revealed in his Four-Year Plan, Germany’s destiny would be realized through conquest, not trade.⁹⁶

Soaring revolutionary sentiments, full of bluster but also raw emotion, were erupting in the press of the high-profile French Communist party and the reports out of Spain by Communists and pro-Comintern leftists. China was radicalizing as well. On August 13, Stalin finally returned Dimitrov’s request for approval of the draft instructions for the Chinese Communists (he merely wrote “in favor”). Two days later, the instructions were radioed to Yan’an, concretizing the actions required under the united front policy, and warning, “It is incorrect to place Chiang Kai-shek on the same plane as the Japanese invaders.”⁹⁷ Mao formally complied, writing to the Nationalists to request an end to their civil war and negotiations.⁹⁸ But Dimitrov would have his hands full trying to enforce Mao’s compliance.

In Spain, the Soviet regime kept to the impression of providing only humanitarian aid voluntarily contributed by workers through trade unions (some 264 million rubles would be collected overall).⁹⁹ But on August 21, 1936, the thirty-year-old Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen and his cinematographer Boris Makaseyev, who had been hastily dispatched to Spain by the politburo, managed to film a Canadian hunter (who had volunteered to fight for the Republic) shooting down an Italian bomber that had been raining destruction on the Republic’s side. A few days later, the world saw Karmen’s documentary footage, which conclusively proved “fascist” support for the Spanish putschists working to overthrow the elected Republic.¹⁰⁰ On August 23, Italy cynically signed the Non-Intervention Agreement. The Soviets did so the same day. Germany would formally sign the next day. From this point, any violation of nonintervention by Moscow could serve as a pretext justifying Italian and German supply of arms to the insurgents.¹⁰¹

SHOWCASE TRIAL

Yezhov was furiously driving extraction of “testimony” for the trial of a “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center” in Moscow. On August 10, he confronted Pyatakov with documents from his opposition days that had been seized at the apartment of his arrested ex-wife. Pyatakov demanded a chance to prove his loyalty, requesting, as Yezhov wrote to Stalin, that “they allow him personally to shoot all those sentenced to be shot at the upcoming trial, including his former wife,” an assignment Pyatakov wanted broadcast. Stalin was only interested that Pyatakov smear himself and others.¹⁰² It was a few days later, late on the night of August 13, that the dictator, after holding a Kremlin banquet for Soviet aviators who had completed the first nonstop flight from Moscow to the Soviet Far East, departed for his annual southern holiday. That day, TASS issued a venomous press release about a trial for treason to commence in a few days with sixteen defendants, including Zinoviev and Kamenev and, in absentia, Trotsky (then fishing in a small Norwegian village). Stalin tasked Kaganovich with implementing the trial’s final push. Before the trial, Vasily Ulrich, chairman of the military collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, presented drafts of the sentences, which Stalin approved, and the Soviet press demanded “no leniency for enemies of the people who have tried to deprive the people of their leaders.”¹⁰³

Also on August 14, the NKVD arrested Vitali Primakov, commander of the Leningrad military district and a hero of the civil war. Six days later, the same fate befell Vitovt Putna, Soviet military attaché to Great Britain (and before that to Japan, Germany, and Finland). Primakov and Putna were charged with “Trotskyism” and participation in a military “plot.” Many Red Army officers had had interactions with them.

The five-day trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite center commenced on August 19, in the October Hall of white Corinthian columns in the House of Trade Unions.¹⁰⁴ The spectacle followed an extended period of behind-the-scenes torture, scripting, and rehearsing, and this time it would result not in mere exile or imprisonment. The defendants, besides the five German Communists who “confessed” to Gestapo ties, were eleven prominent Bolsheviks of the 1926–27 opposition.¹⁰⁵ Ten of the sixteen happened to be Jewish (this received no special attention). Invited audience members numbered some 150 people, including 30 handpicked foreign journalists and diplomats, as well as many plainclothes NKVD operatives, but not the relatives of the accused. Despite slipups that betrayed the fabrication, the defendants, all Communists, publicly confessed to being wreckers, spies, terrorists.¹⁰⁶ (Kaganovich made sure to add himself and Orjonikidze to the list of targets.)¹⁰⁷ “I, Kamenev, together with Zinoviev and Trotsky, organized and guided this conspiracy,” Stalin’s former close associate stated. “I had become convinced that the party’s—Stalin’s—policy was successful and victorious. We, the opposition, had banked on a split in the party, but this hope proved groundless. We could no longer count on any serious domestic difficulties to allow us to overthrow Stalin’s leadership.”

Some of the “testimony” had implicated rightists (Rykov, Bukharin, Tomsky), and Kaganovich and Yezhov (August 20) had jointly telegrammed Stalin in Sochi asking for instructions on that score. The next day, the dictator permitted mention at the trial of the rightists, as well as a yet-to-be-unveiled “parallel center” (Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, Radek). On that day, Izvestiya published an essay by Radek, who, as a former Trotsky supporter, lent his credibility to the wild charges against Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, calling the attempts to assassinate the Soviet leader and the links to the Gestapo “a plot to restore capitalism in the USSR.”¹⁰⁸ Stalin had also been prompted to remember the out-of-favor poet Demyan Bedny, who published “No Mercy!” in Pravda (August 21): “Here are the ones who murdered Kirov! . . . They were going for Stalin!”¹⁰⁹

Testifying to these fixations, Stalin’s holiday correspondence changed. It remained laconic and often ill-humored, sometimes downright scolding, with almost no personal information—just directives and responses to initiatives by Kaganovich (or Molotov). But content-wise, of the more than 140 letters and ciphered telegrams he exchanged during this holiday, a mere half dozen concerned the industrial economy, and most of those involved the dictator approving others’ proposals, without comment.¹¹⁰ Now the mailbag also included the transcript of a Tomsky speech, interrogation “protocols” of Kamenev, draft protocols of Sokolnikov’s interrogation. (Stalin: “Did he not inform [the British journalist] of the plans for the assassination of Soviet leaders? Of course he did.”) Such documents were pointing to a vast, phantasmagoric conspiracy, from party officials to military men. Bukharin, hiking the Pamirs in Central Asia, had hurried back to Moscow to find Stalin away on holiday, and would write the dictator a letter, which also found its way into the holiday mailbag, rabidly endorsing all the fabricated charges of the trial, except those about himself (“I embrace you, for I’m clean”).¹¹¹ Trotsky, who hurriedly returned to Oslo from his fishing holiday, told the New York Times that the trial was fraudulent and “puts the Dreyfus scandal and the Reichstag fire trial in the shadow.”¹¹²

As for Tomsky, when his driver arrived at his dacha outside Moscow to pick him up for his job as head of the state publishing house—bearing a copy of that morning’s Pravda (August 22), which reported an investigation into Tomsky for counterrevolution—he shot himself. Tomsky prepared a suicide note (“Dear Comrade Stalin”), expressing his despair while protesting his innocence, and beseeching the dictator, whom he called his “old fighting comrade,” not to believe Zinoviev’s slander against him. Tomsky apologized, yet again, for his comment one evening in 1928 that someone would shoot Stalin. “Do not take seriously what I blurted out then—I have deeply regretted this always.”¹¹³ Pravda reported the suicide the next day as an admission of guilt.¹¹⁴ In an act of attempted posthumous revenge that played on Stalin’s conspiratorial bent, Tomsky cleverly implicated NKVD chief Yagoda as a rightist coconspirator, having his wife convey orally the “secret” that Yagoda was the person who had “recruited” Tomsky.¹¹⁵

Kamenev and Stalin had known each other for more than three decades. “Greetings, friend! I kiss you on the nose, Eskimo-style,” Stalin had written to him in December 1912, evoking their Siberian exile. “For hell’s sake! I miss you devilishly. I miss you—I swear by my dog. I have no one, no one to chat with, heart to heart, may the devil run you over.”¹¹⁶ On the eve of Kamenev’s execution, Stalin wrote to Kaganovich that Kamenev, through his wife, had sounded out the French ambassador about supporting a possible Trotskyite-Zinovievite government. “I believe Kamenev also sounded out the English, German, and American ambassadors,” Stalin added. “This means Kamenev was supposed to reveal to these foreigners the plans for the conspiracy and the murder of the leaders of the party. This also means Kamenev had already revealed the plans to them, for otherwise the foreigners would not have begun talking about the future Trotskyite-Zinovievite ‘government’ with him.”¹¹⁷ Did Stalin believe this? Was he straining to justify his political murders to Kaganovich? These questions remain unanswerable.

Stalin supervised the trial from afar, sternly instructing Kaganovich that the sentences had to mention Trotsky and Sedov. (“This carries enormous significance for Europe, both for the bourgeoisie and for the workers.”)¹¹⁸ A few hours after the court had adjourned on August 24, Ulrich, at 2:30 a.m., pronounced the defendants guilty and condemned all but one to death. Later that day, the regime staged a grand aviation display at Moscow’s Tushinsky Aerodrome (“Glory to Stalinist aviation and the Stalinist falcons”). Planes flew difficult maneuvers. Parachutists dropped from the sky. “The enemies’ schemes,” a teacher in the Institute of World Economy and International Relations recorded in his diary, “cannot stop our enormous successes.”¹¹⁹ Kamenev and the others wrote appeals for mercy in the predawn hours. (Only one defendant expressly refused to do so.) Perhaps, as would be rumored, Stalin had promised them their lives in exchange for public “confessions” to crimes they had not committed.¹²⁰ But well before the end of the seventy-two-hour period for appeals specified in Soviet law, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and the rest were executed in the cellars.¹²¹ Yezhov retrieved the bullet casings as souvenirs.

FORCING MASS HYSTERIA

The day after the August 13, 1936, discussion of Spain in the Little Corner, Stalin received a résumé of Soviet-Spanish diplomatic relations from Krestinsky, which accelerated a belated exchange of ambassadors. The choice fell to a twenty-year veteran of the Soviet diplomatic corps, Marcel Rosenberg, who was summoned from Karlsbad.¹²² Litvinov had written to Kaganovich urging that people appointed as ambassadors in major countries should know the local language, while lamenting that the foreign affairs commissariat had only a single fluent Spanish speaker: Leonid Gaikis, a Lithuanian who had grown up in Argentina and was serving as consul general in Istanbul. Litvinov felt constrained to inform Kaganovich, with a copy to Stalin, that in 1923 Gaikis had voted for the Trotskyite platform. Stalin did not prevent Gaikis’s appointment as an “adviser” in the embassy in Madrid, effectively Rosenberg’s deputy.¹²³ A bit later, Stalin would consent to the establishment of a consulate in Catalonia and the appointment there of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, the hero of the 1917 storming of the Winter Palace—also a repentant former Trotsky sympathizer. The consul would tell Ilya Ehrenburg, who would go to Spain as an Izvestiya correspondent, that his key task would consist of making the Spanish anarchists “see reason.”¹²⁴

Before Stalin had gone on holiday, the politburo had first approved a Pravda request to send a special correspondent to Spain, Mikhail Koltsov, the Soviet Union’s best-known journalist-propagandist.¹²⁵ During the 1920s and ’30s, he had published more than a thousand stylistically free-flowing essays, including on collectivization (“Fortress in the Steppe”), driving a taxi in Moscow, and flying in the first Soviet-made airplane. Koltsov could do what almost no one else could: toe the Stalinist line while delivering enduring portraits of Soviet life. He had a sense of humor, too, founding Crocodile, the Soviet humor magazine, and had even been to Spain, following the fall of its monarchy, and published Spanish Spring (1933).¹²⁶ By August 8, 1936, he’d arrived in Madrid, and over the next several weeks he managed to compose twenty reports for Pravda, relayed by telephone to Moscow. “A stocky little Jew with a huge head and one of the most expressive faces of any man I ever met,” Claud Cockburn, a British journalist who encountered Koltsov in Spain, would recall. “He unquestionably and positively enjoyed the sense of danger and sometimes—by his political indiscretions, for instance, or still more wildly indiscreet love affairs—deliberately created dangers which need not have existed.”¹²⁷ Koltsov’s engaging reportage for Soviet readers would render Spain’s civil war immediate and in Stalin’s preferred light: as a struggle not just against fascism per se but against Trotskyism—indeed, against a supposed linkup between Trotskyism and fascism.¹²⁸

Was there Trotskyism in Spain? Spain’s Popular Front government consisted of representatives of its Republican parties, which received support from the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (only nominally united), the Syndicalist Party and various anarchist formations (at least initially), Basque separatists, the Spanish Communist party, and the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). The latter, formed in 1935, consisted of breakaway left Communists and dissident Marxist-Leninists who demanded an immediate transition to a dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain, precisely Trotsky’s position. The leading theorist of the POUM, Andreu Nin, had spent nine years in Moscow as secretary general of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) and had sided with Trotsky’s left opposition. Nin broke with Moscow and had a falling-out with the exiled Trotsky as well. In spring 1936, Trotsky had set his followers the task of exposing “the full wretchedness of the leadership of the ‘Workers Party of Marxist Unification’ and especially of the former ‘Left Communists’ . . . before the eyes of all the advanced workers.”¹²⁹ On August 10, 1936, Victor Serge—an intellectual Stalin had released into foreign exile, who was now busy translating Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed into French—begged Trotsky to take back his harsh words about the POUM, “to deny the bureaucracy any possibility whatsoever of turning the revolution into a prison for workers in the Stalinist manner.” But Trotsky continued to lacerate the POUM for supposedly vacillating between support of the “bourgeois” democratic phase of Spain’s revolution and of Trotsky’s Fourth International (full-bore anticapitalist revolution).¹³⁰

Koltsov’s crafty reportage conveying a Trotsky-centric interpretation of events in Spain perfectly complemented the saturation coverage and orchestrated meetings all across the USSR over the Trotskyite showcase trial, together whipping up anti-Trotsky hysteria. In Stalin’s worldview, Nin’s hoary link to Trotsky alone rendered the POUM “Trotskyite.” There was also the POUM’s independence, criticizing the Stalinist line while claiming the mantle of Marxism. Some members of the POUM, moreover, openly admired Trotsky, and some of its officials discussed inviting him to take up residence in Barcelona. Sometimes fabricated nightmares have a way of coming true. The Trotsky bogey had long been one of Stalin’s prime instruments for enforcing dictatorial rule; now, all of a sudden, he had to worry about a victory of the anti-Stalinist left— Trotskyism to him—in a real country. “Trotsky, and all that Trotsky represented, was Stalin’s real fear,” American diplomat George Kennan would surmise.¹³¹ Kennan was speaking broadly, not in connection with Spain per se, but Spain had become the place.

“GREETINGS”

Public confessions by Lenin’s former comrades to monstrous state crimes and the rabid saturation propaganda about hidden enemies had revolutionized the political atmosphere. The White émigré press rejoiced at the executions: “Sixteen is not enough! Give us forty more, give us hundreds, give us thousands.” Alexander Kerensky, in exile in the United States, saw nothing surprising in accusations that Trotsky had collaborated with the Gestapo: after all, had not Lenin and Trotsky been German agents in 1917?¹³² Lev Sedov, in a detailed exposé of the trial, called Lenin the “first terrorist”: after all, his Testament had instructed, “Remove Stalin.” Stalin, for his part, fumed at Kaganovich and Molotov (September 6) that Pravda’s trial coverage had “failed to produce a single article that provided a Marxist explanation,” because “the newspaper wrapped everything in personal terms, that there are evil people who want to seize power and good people who are in power. . . . The articles should say that the struggle against Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, . . . and others is a struggle against the Soviets, against collectivization, against industrialization, a struggle, consequently, for the restoration of capitalism. . . . They should have said, finally, that the degradation of these scum to the level of White Guards and fascists is a logical outgrowth of their moral decline as [Communist] opposition leaders in the past.”¹³³

Pravda (September 4, 1936) had crowed that the number of “Trotskyites” was “microscopic,” and that the “opposition” had been dealt a crushing blow. But Yezhov, in a letter (September 9) to Sochi with details of Tomsky’s suicide, wrote that “without doubt the Trotskyites in the army have some unmasked cadres,” adding that Trotskyite “ties” inside the secret police had yet to be investigated properly.¹³⁴

Bukharin had written to Voroshilov, “I’m terribly glad the dogs were shot.”¹³⁵ On September 10, 1936, Pravda suddenly announced that the procuracy had cleared Bukharin, as well as Rykov, of connections to terrorism.¹³⁶ But four days later, Kaganovich reported to Sochi the results of the “interrogations” of Bukharin, Rykov, and Sokolnikov, commenting that the latter—Kaganovich’s once-close comrade back in Nizhny Novgorod and Turkestan—had been “in contact” with the “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center” and adding that it was good the USSR was exterminating “all these rats.”¹³⁷ Bukharin wrote to Stalin again, claiming to be “mentally ill,” under too much strain to “go on living,” because his life had “become meaningless. . . . This is surely a paradox: the more I devote myself to serving the party with all my heart, the worse my unfortunate predicament becomes, and now I no longer have the strength to fight against the attacks anymore. . . . I urgently beg of you to allow me to come and see you. . . . Only you can cure me. If my fate is of any concern to you . . . then meet with me.”¹³⁸ Stalin ignored this plea.

Orjonikidze, in early September 1936, had gone on his annual holiday to Kislovodsk. He wrote to Stalin (September 7) that he had listened to parts of the trial on the radio in Kaganovich’s office. “Shooting them was not enough,” he noted. “If it had been possible, they should have been shot at least ten times. . . . They caused tremendous harm to the party. Now, knowing what they’re made of, you don’t know who’s telling the truth and who’s lying, who’s a friend and who’s a double-dealer. This is the poison they injected into the party. . . . People don’t know whether they can trust this or that former Trotskyite or Zinovievite.” After condemning people who were already dead, he added pointedly: “I am very worried about the army. . . . A skillful enemy could deal us an irreparable blow here: they will start to spread rumors about people and instill distrust in the army. Here we need to be very careful.” Orjonikidze also tried to shield his deputy Pyatakov: “If we do not arrest him, let us send him somewhere, or leave him in the Urals, as at present.”¹³⁹ Stalin had Pyatakov expelled from the Central Committee and the party (September 9) without a meeting. In the NKVD inventory of his confiscated property were his Order of Lenin and his party card, no. 0000059—a low number, indicating very long membership (Pyatakov was one of only six figures mentioned in Lenin’s Testament).¹⁴⁰ On September 11, Stalin answered Orjonikidze from Sochi: “1) Pyatakov is already under arrest. 2) It’s possible Radek will be arrested. Toroshelidze and Budu [Mdivani] are thoroughly stained. They too could be arrested. . . . Greetings to Zina. I. Stalin.”¹⁴¹

SUDDEN DECISION

Policy on Spain took a sudden turn. On August 29, 1936, the politburo had prohibited sending arms, ammunition, or planes to Spain, in accord with the Non-Intervention Agreement, a prohibition Pravda had announced (August 30). On September 2, in a telegram to the Soviet embassy in London, Litvinov had written that “guiding our relationship to the Spanish events is a striving in every possible way to impede the delivery of weapons to the Spanish insurgents and the necessity of strictly curtailing the activities of countries such as Germany, Italy, and Portugal.”¹⁴² But Spanish events were moving rapidly. On September 4, the first Soviet-produced newsreels from Spain were shown in Moscow, and soon they were distributed to other large cities.¹⁴³ That same day, Francisco Largo Caballero, a trade unionist, head of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and Spain’s most prominent civilian politician, became prime minister. The Spanish Communist party accepted an invitation to join the new cabinet in the Popular Front coalition (the anarchists declined).¹⁴⁴ For Moscow, the stakes had been raised. Already, prior to this in early September, the politburo had begun approving, by voice vote, plans for shipments of Soviet industrial goods to Spain. But now Stalin sent a telegram to Kaganovich (September 6, 1936) about how “it would be good” to sell Mexico fifty Soviet bombers, and possibly 20,000 rifles and 20 million cartridges, which could then get to Spain.¹⁴⁵ This short cipher—sent the same day Stalin dressed down the Soviet press summaries of the recent Moscow trial of Trotskyites—effectively set in motion a Soviet military intervention.

Stalin, with Voroshilov (communicating by high-frequency phone), had decided against committing regular Soviet troops.¹⁴⁶ But the politburo had already resolved to form volunteer “international brigades,” to be organized in Paris under the leadership of André Marty, assisted by the Italian Communist party in exile, and funded by Moscow. Many of the volunteers—from the United States, the British Isles, Latin America, and the whole of the European continent, including Nazi Germany and fascist Italy—were not Communists but idealists or adventurers.¹⁴⁷ (The volunteers’ passports would be taken for “safekeeping,” a windfall for the NKVD.)¹⁴⁸ These Comintern brigades remained within the letter of the Non-Intervention Agreement. No Soviet nationals were allowed to join, although many volunteered to.

Now Stalin also approved the dispatch not just of propagandists and diplomats but military advisers.¹⁴⁹ The commander of a Soviet naval cruiser, Nikolai Kuznetsov, who was at sea, received a telegram summons to Moscow and, at the defense commissariat, discovered that he was being posted to Spain as naval attaché. (“What do you know about Spain?” he was asked.)¹⁵⁰ The top military adviser appointed to Spain was the Latvian Berzin, who had headed Soviet military intelligence until 1935. The Soviet military attaché to the Madrid front was Vladimir Gorev (b. 1900), a blond Belorussian peasant who had become a veteran undercover military intelligence operative with experience in China and the United States, spoke excellent English, and had exemplary manners.¹⁵¹ The position of commercial attaché was soon filled by Artur Stashevsky [Hirschfeld], a Jew born in tsarist Latvia, who had been a driving force in the accumulation of Soviet gold reserves and who, in Spain, would serve as the top Soviet political operative.¹⁵² Already by early fall, there would be more than 550 Soviet personnel in-country, the highest ranking of whom took up residence in Madrid’s Palace Hotel.¹⁵³

Additionally, the NKVD sent Leiba Feldbein, who used the name Alexander Orlov, to gather intelligence and organize guerrilla warfare in Spain.¹⁵⁴ Orlov had been born (1895) in Belorussia and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, joining Trotsky’s group of leftist internationalists in 1917, fighting for the Reds in the Russian civil war, and in 1920, at age twenty-five, joining the party and the Cheka in Arkhangelsk, going on to work in the economic and transport sections of the secret police and undercover in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Copenhagen, and London. “He spoke English well, dressed dapperly, was good-looking and very intelligent,” Louis Fischer would write.¹⁵⁵ Abram Slutsky, head of NKVD foreign intelligence, had evidently alighted upon his friend Orlov for posting to Spain partly to protect him: a young assistant in the NKVD with whom Orlov had been having an affair shot herself in front of Lubyanka HQ after he refused to leave his wife.¹⁵⁶ Orlov, his wife, and their daughter would cross the Soviet-Polish border en route to Spain on September 10, 1936.¹⁵⁷

Ilya Ehrenburg, the Izvestiya correspondent, who arrived in Spain a few weeks after his rival Pravda correspondent Koltsov, wrote in a letter to Stalin (also on September 10), after having traveled more than 1,500 miles of Spanish territory, that “POUM (the Trotskyites) in Catalonia are weak. At the front, their column of 3,500 men is the most undisciplined. They have tense relations with the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (our party) and with the anarchists.”¹⁵⁸ Stalin held the opposite view on the POUM’s threat.

DIFFERENT SHOWS

In London on September 9, 1936, the Non-Intervention Committee held its first meeting, with twenty-seven European states represented. The session devolved into insults. Especially acrimonious exchanges took place between the Soviet ambassador (Ivan Maisky) and the German embassy counselor (Prince Otto von Bismarck, grandson of the chancellor).¹⁵⁹ But the deeper problem was the conveners’ cynicism. “A piece of humbug,” one senior British foreign office official observed of the committee. “Where humbug is the alternative to war, it is impossible to place too high a value upon it.”¹⁶⁰ But given that the public heard every day about how Italy and Germany were intervening forcefully, British credibility suffered a blow.

Contemporaneously with the sorry spectacle in London, military attachés and specialists from France and Czechoslovakia, as well as Britain, had been invited to Red Army maneuvers (September 7–10)—a show to impress. This was the first time a British delegation had been invited. Held in the Belorussian military district, commanded by the capable Iona Yakir, the Bessarabian-born (1896) son of a Jewish pharmacist, the exercises assumed a German-Polish aggression against the Soviet Union.¹⁶¹ All told, an astonishing 85,000 troops and auxiliaries and 1,136 tanks and armored vehicles took part. The “enemy” (blues) attacked with almost 37,000 men, 211 airplanes, and 453 combined-arms tanks, mostly T-28s but also T-27s (the Soviet variant of the Carden Loyd tankette), while the “friendly” forces (reds) possessed more than 42,000 men and 240 airplanes, as well as three mechanized brigades and several rifle and cavalry-tank units. The terrain was circumscribed in relation to the size of forces engaged and, without rivers or marshes, artificially ideal for tank warfare. After aviation created a smoke fog, the large mechanized units forged the Berezina River. One mechanized tank brigade completed a 125-mile march. The culmination entailed a parachute drop and reassembly, in battle formation, of some 1,800 men armed with machine guns and light artillery.¹⁶² The scale, complexity, and coordination of the exercises, according to Pravda (September 10), duly impressed the onlookers. In fact, Britain’s Lieutenant Colonel Giffard Martel, a well-known tank theorist at the war office, was put in mind of the tsarist army: great physical brutality with manifest “tactical clumsiness.” Privately dismissing the exercise as “more like a tattoo than maneuvers,” he deemed the training of junior officers weak, found radio communication not widely used, and saw little skill in the use of mechanized formations. Martel surmised that a well-equipped and well-commanded enemy could dodge the blow and inflict tremendous counterdamage.¹⁶³

General Victor-Henri Schweisguth, who led the French delegation, told Voroshilov that Hitler saw the Soviet Union as the source of evil and was menacingly accusing Czechoslovakia of complicity in that evil. Voroshilov retorted that Hitler’s anti-Soviet ravings masked his real intention of attacking France, and once again urged bilateral staff talks.¹⁶⁴ Schweisguth made a mental note that his Soviet counterparts claimed to want closer military cooperation with France yet seemed eager for Hitler to attack France first. In his confidential report upon return to Paris, he deemed the Red Army “insufficiently prepared for a war against a Great European Power,” adding: “The circumstances of its employment against Germany remain very problematical.” He warned that the Soviets hoped that “the storm burst first upon France,” and that, because of the absence of a common frontier with Germany, the Soviet Union could stand aside, like the United States in 1918, “to arbitrate the situation in the face of a Europe exhausted by battle.”¹⁶⁵ Schweisguth saw value in talks with the Soviets only as prevention against a Soviet-German military alliance.¹⁶⁶ The feelings were mutual: Yakir, who had just traveled to France, came back with a low regard for French military doctrine, technical level, operational-strategic thinking, and its army as a whole.¹⁶⁷

Captain František Moravec, of Czechoslovak military intelligence, had arrived in Moscow before the maneuvers to cooperate with his Soviet counterparts in connection with their alliance treaty. Quartered at the Metropole and enveloped by Soviet counterintelligence, his six-man Czechoslovak team was received by Uritsky, head of military intelligence, becoming the first group of foreigners admitted to the “Chocolate House,” the three-story mansion that served as HQ, and then by Tukhachevsky, chief of the general staff. There were banquets at Spiridonovka on gold plates with the tsar’s monogram, stay-overs at the former Yusupov Palace in Arkhangelskoe, and a visit to the Moscow–Volga Canal Gulag site. He perceived his Soviet partners as ignorant of the Wehrmacht, noting that Soviet military intelligence “had not even organized proper supporting activities, such as the study of the German news media.” Whether Moravec, who spoke Russian, was shown the breadth of Soviet capabilities remains uncertain (the Czechoslovaks were technically “White Guards”). Still, he was correct about the dearth of foreign-language expertise in a system that valued proletarian origins and sycophancy over expertise. “The unexpected inefficiency in the military intelligence service of a regime which had been nourished on clandestine undertakings,” he concluded, “was surprising.”¹⁶⁸ The men from Prague felt an urgency vis-à-vis their neighbor Nazi Germany that was not felt in Moscow.¹⁶⁹

Most damaging of all the private reports on the maneuvers was Voroshilov’s. At the banquet, in front of foreigners, he lauded the exercises. But while Tukhachevsky, acknowledging the shortcomings of tank performance in the rifle divisions, whose commanders still did not know how to use them to the fullest, deemed their efforts superior to what the Red Army had previously managed, Voroshilov internally denounced the tank formations and urged a doubling down on infantry.¹⁷⁰ Part of his motivation appears to have been long-standing envy at the superior abilities and reputations of Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and Uborevičius (commander of the Ukrainian military district), all modernizers, and more knowledgeable about Germany.¹⁷¹

OPERATION X

On September 13, 1936, the city of San Sebastián fell to Spain’s putschists. The next day, Molotov, having just returned from holiday, followed up on Stalin’s telegram to Kaganovich the week before and chaired a meeting devoted to, among other matters, Spain. Attendees included Yagoda, Slutsky (NKVD foreign intelligence), Uritsky (military intelligence), Meyer Trilisser (Comintern intelligence), and Dimitrov, who recorded an agenda item as “organization of aid to the Spanish (via a smuggling scheme).”¹⁷² Later that day at Lubyanka, Yagoda presided over a meeting with Slutsky, Uritsky, Mikhail Frinovsky (head of NKVD border guards), and others to plan foreign military deliveries, including purchases abroad, for Spain. Before September 14 was out, Slutsky and Uritsky had presented Kaganovich with corrections to an operational plan, code-named Operation X.¹⁷³

Also on September 14, the annual Nazi Nuremberg party rally concluded as Hitler announced further rearmament steps and unleashed his most rabid denunciation yet of the international Jewish conspiracy and the “infernal plague” of Bolshevism, which was “letting loose these wild beasts on the terrified and helpless world.” He mentioned German designs on Ukraine. In response to this drumbeat, the Soviet state publishing house issued a collection of translated original German documents from the period of the Great War, The Crash of the German Occupation in Ukraine, underscoring the high costs then of Germany’s attempted colonial enslavement of Ukraine and warning, “Let German fascists now try to poke their snouts onto Soviet land!”¹⁷⁴ The Führer still hoped to catalyze a broad anti-Bolshevik coalition, which would support, or at least not block, German expansionism eastward and continental domination. He portrayed the Soviet Union as intent on imminent attack, but his ravings made it seem as if Germany would march then and there.¹⁷⁵ The U.S. ambassador in Berlin thought the rally speeches might “make it difficult for the Soviet embassy to remain in Berlin.”¹⁷⁶ Hitler mused that Stalin would be moved to break off diplomatic relations.¹⁷⁷ Litvinov urged a Soviet diplomatic protest to deter further invective.¹⁷⁸ Stalin, on the contrary, was soon renewing feelers to the Nazi regime.

Voroshilov sent detailed lists of all materials to be supplied in the Spanish operation to Stalin for approval.¹⁷⁹ Because of the Non-Intervention Agreement, the Soviets had initially aimed to provide only third-party and “surplus” weapons, but, given the urgency, Operation X specified also providing Soviet weapons—just as the Spanish government had been requesting. Soviet intelligence was estimating that the Republic possessed one rifle for every three soldiers.¹⁸⁰ On September 18, the first small-arms shipment, labeled CANNED MEAT, left a Soviet port. So did humanitarian cargo (flour, sugar, butter, canned goods, clothing, medicine).¹⁸¹ Secret Soviet documents stipulated that for the weapons “the customer should pay their full price.” Back on September 13, the Spanish Republic had secretly decided to evacuate the better part of the country’s gold reserves from Madrid by train. Spain had the world’s fourth-largest reserves, amounting to more than 2.3 trillion pesetas, or $783 million at prevailing exchange rates, a cache amassed by the crown over centuries: bullion bars, gold louis d’or, British sovereigns, rare Portuguese coins, Inca and Aztec treasure from the conquistador period. The crates began arriving at the port of Cartagena in the early hours of September 17, and for the next five and a half weeks remained in a hillside cave above the harbor. Prime Minister Largo Caballero had shipped the gold to the port at which Spain had agreed to receive Soviet cargo.

NKVD COUP

In Moscow, comic relief arrived on September 19, 1936, when regional party boss Kuzma Ryndin, after whom twenty collective farms and mines had been named, petitioned the dictator to rename Chelyabinsk—which roughly connoted “a pit”—into “Kaganovichgrad.” Stalin wrote on the request: “Against.”¹⁸² The next day, the politburo formally rejected a proposal from Litvinov for an expanded Soviet-led bloc against Nazi Germany, but it reaffirmed the pursuit of “collective security.”¹⁸³ Franco was busy establishing a regime. On the battlefield he took his time, transferring operations from urgent military objectives to political ones, perplexing the other generals. On September 21, in a hut on an airfield in Salamanca, citing the need for unified command in the war effort, Franco managed to get himself elevated to generalissimo of insurgent armies, even though he was junior to Mola. A week later, Franco manipulated matters further to get himself named chief of state with “absolute powers.” Several of the colluding commanders envisioned his elevation as temporary, anticipating a return of the monarchy, but Franco remarked of the moment, “You have placed Spain in my hands.” He did not even control Madrid.

Throughout Europe, significant doubts reverberated among leftist intellectuals about the alleged treason of the executed Bolshevik revolutionaries, but in Republic Spain, the POUM’s La Batalla was almost the only newspaper to detail, let alone condemn, the Moscow showcase trial, labeling the Soviet Union a “bureaucratic regime of poisonous dictatorship.” Tit for tat, the lead editorial in the September 1936 issue of The Communist International, issued in multiple European languages, condemned the POUM as fascist agents masquerading as leftists, with ties to Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler.¹⁸⁴

Yezhov was bombarding Stalin with reports of secret police deficiencies and forwarded a denunciation of Yagoda by a provincial NKVD chief.¹⁸⁵ Stalin summoned Yezhov to the Black Sea.¹⁸⁶ Yagoda evidently knew, eavesdropping on Stalin’s calls to Yezhov in Moscow.¹⁸⁷ Yefim Yevdokimov, whose bailiwick included Sochi, was also likely pouring poison into Stalin’s ear about the detested Yagoda.¹⁸⁸ Suddenly, on the evening of September 25, 1936, Stalin sent a bombshell phonegram from Sochi to Kaganovich and Molotov, in Moscow, urging Yagoda’s removal. The message was cosigned by Andrei Zhdanov, the dictator’s new favorite, ten years younger than Kirov (and eighteen younger than Stalin), who was with him at the dacha. “Yagoda clearly turned out to be not up to the task of unmasking the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc,” the secret message read. “The OGPU was four years late in this process.”¹⁸⁹ “Four years” harked back to the meetings among a few party opposition members damning Stalin’s rule, as a result of the catastrophe of collectivization and famine. Among the potential candidates to head the NKVD were the experienced Chekists Yevdokimov and Balytsky, who at one time had risen to number three in the secret police, before Yagoda squeezed him out of Moscow and sent him back to Ukraine. Yet another option was Lavrenti Beria, the (nominally) former Chekist running the South Caucasus party machine.¹⁹⁰ But Stalin picked his party-apparatus protégé Yezhov.