Stalin

Chiang, upon being taken into custody, was speechless. (He has himself telling his captors, “I am the Generalissimo. Kill me, but do not subject me to indignities.”)²⁹⁵ Zhang’s head bodyguard carried Chiang to a car and set off for a government office in Xi’an. Zhang, standing at attention, addressed him as commander in chief. “I wish to lay my views before your excellency, the generalissimo,” Zhang said to his captive, pleading with him to work with the Communists in a patriotic coalition. Zhang had aides draft formal proposals for a united “National Salvation” government, an immediate end to the civil war, and a release and pardon of all political prisoners. He also requested that the Chinese Communists receive an invitation to send a delegation to Xi’an.²⁹⁶ Chiang repeatedly denounced him as a rebel. “Your bad temper,” Zhang replied, “is always the cause of trouble.”²⁹⁷

Chiang’s surprise capture would seem to have offered Moscow a chance to discredit him as incompetent in the anti-Japanese crusade and to exact revenge. After all, this was the same Chiang who had humiliated Stalin with a massacre of Chinese Communists in 1927 and, subsequently, had nearly destroyed the Chinese Red Army in a series of ruthless encirclement campaigns. Word reached Moscow that same day of December 13. “Optimistic, favorable assessment regarding Zhang Xueliang,” crowed the normally restrained Dimitrov, in his diary.²⁹⁸ Dimitrov’s Chinese assistant in the Comintern recalled that “you could not find anyone” who did not feel “Chiang must be finished off.” Manuilsky, he added, “rubbed his hands, embraced me, and exclaimed, ‘Our dear friend has been caught, aha!’”²⁹⁹ That same day, Mao was even more gleeful. “Chiang has owed us a blood debt as high as a mountain,” he was quoted as exclaiming at a meeting in his cave. “Now it is time to liquidate the blood debt. Chiang must be brought to Bao’an for a public trial.”³⁰⁰ Mao sent congratulations to Zhang, whom he called China’s “national leader in resisting Japan.”³⁰¹

Stalin, to a considerable extent, held the fate of China and, indeed, Asia in his hands.

CHINA IN THE BALANCE

Dimitrov, on December 14, 1936, held a meeting of Comintern hierarchs, after which he wrote to Stalin that the Chinese Communists had become close to Zhang, despite Comintern warnings about his unreliability, and that “it was hard to imagine Zhang Xueliang would have undertaken his adventurist action without coordination with them.”³⁰² Around midnight, Stalin phoned him: “Are these events in China occurring with your authorization? This is the greatest service to Japan anyone could possibly render. Who is this Wang Ming of yours? A provocateur? He wanted to file a telegram to have Chiang Kai-shek killed.” (Wang Ming, born Chen Shaoyu in 1904, headed the Chinese Comintern delegation in Moscow.) When Dimitrov claimed innocence, Stalin stated, “I’ll find you that telegram.”³⁰³ (There was likely no such telegram: Stalin was misinformed or trying to scare Dimitrov into pulling back.) Later still, Molotov phoned the Comintern head: “Come to Comrade Stalin’s office tomorrow at 3:30; we’ll discuss Ch[inese] affairs. Only you and Man[uilsky], nobody else!”³⁰⁴ Pravda (December 14) and Izvestiya (December 15) condemned Chiang’s kidnapping as playing into Japanese hands.

The Comintern officials were received on December 16, at 7:20 p.m., for fifty minutes.³⁰⁵ Dimitrov and Manuilsky, along with Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and Stalin, hammered out a telegram for the Chinese Communists that condemned Zhang’s move, “whatever his intentions,” as inciting Japanese aggression and a united imperialist bloc against China, and ordered the Chinese Communists to stand “decisively for a peaceful resolution of the conflict,” while enjoining the Nationalists to cease their attempted destruction of the Chinese Red Army and to unite for the struggle against Japanese imperialism. This was precisely Zhang’s position (which went unmentioned).³⁰⁶ In Xi’an on December 16, Zhang addressed the public in the central square, explaining that he had served, and would continue to serve, under Chiang, but that the generalissimo must engage the struggle against the Japanese. “Chiang thinks that he is the government,” Zhang stated. “Since he refuses to turn the guns against the enemy, and turns them against us, I had no alternative but to . . . arrest him.”³⁰⁷ The Nationalist executive committee and political council in Nanking, meanwhile, directed its Central Army toward Xi’an.³⁰⁸

Had Stalin been driven predominantly by vengeance, he would have ordered Chiang killed (or just let it happen). But Stalin acted from his sense of strategy. The same applied to his domestic terror.

Before being dismissed from Stalin’s office, Dimitrov was privy to a denunciation of Blum (“a charlatan. He’s no Largo Caballero”) and a discussion of the NKVD’s interrogation of Sokolnikov: “The investigation concludes that Trotsky abroad and the center of the bloc within the USSR entered into negotiations with the Hitlerite and Japanese governments . . . first, to provoke a war by Germany and Japan against the USSR; second, to promote the defeat of the USSR in that war and to take advantage of that defeat to achieve the transfer of power in the USSR to their government bloc; third, on behalf of the future bloc government, to guarantee territorial and economic concessions to the Hitlerite and Japanese governments.” Sokolnikov had joined the party in 1905, at age seventeen, been with Lenin on the sealed train in April 1917, signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which had ended up saving the fledgling regime in 1918, led the civil war reconquest of Turkestan in 1920, masterminded the NEP stabilization as finance commissar, and served as an effective ambassador to Britain. But it turned out he had all along been working to overthrow Soviet power. Sokolnikov was said to have confessed.³⁰⁹

Two days later, Dimitrov received the prominent German Jewish antifascist novelist Jacob Arje (b. 1884), known as Lion Feuchtwanger, and his common-law wife, Maria Osten (Gresshöner). “It is incomprehensible why the accused are admitting everything, knowing it will cost them their lives,” Feuchtwanger pointed out, regarding the trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. “It is incomprehensible why, apart from the confessions of the accused, no sort of evidence has been produced.” Feuchtwanger, a Soviet sympathizer, added that “the records of the trial” were “full of contradictions, unconvincing. The trial is conducted monstrously.”³¹⁰

Dimitrov’s radiogram for the Chinese comrades arrived in Bao’an village on December 17 or 18. (Part of it had failed to transmit; Mao would read the full text only on December 20.) “Mao Zedong flew into a rage when the order came from Moscow to release Chiang” rather than to stage a trial and execution, wrote the youthful Communist sympathizer Edgar Snow, claiming to have heard from an eyewitness (the widow of Sun Yat-sen). “Mao swore and stamped his feet.”³¹¹ Mao, on December 19, said to an assembly of the Chinese politburo, “The Japanese say that the arrest [of Chiang] was arranged by the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union says that it was contrived by the Japanese.”³¹² That day, the Chinese Communists issued a statement that Zhang and his men “had acted on the basis of patriotic motives, honestly and with sincere zealotry for the fate of the nation.”³¹³ Mao detested Chiang and any appearance of buckling under to Moscow, but Zhou, after trekking by donkey to see Mao, flew to Xi’an on a Zhang-supplied plane and ordered him not to harm Chiang, citing Stalin’s direct orders. Zhang was to release him after somehow extracting a promise of a renewed united front.³¹⁴ Of course, this had been Zhang’s plan all along.

“KAUTSKY”

Stalin and Britain effectively shared the same goal in the Far East—prevention of a Japanese conquest of China—but British-Soviet negotiations between May and December 1936, on London’s initiative, for a bilateral pact on naval limitations failed. Britain continued to want to get other runners in the naval arms race to run more slowly, for a time, so that it could cross the finish line first. But the Soviets, like Nazi Germany, did not really want limitations. Even more, Moscow sought the most advanced British naval technology and technical assistance as part of its program to build an oceangoing fleet.³¹⁵ Cooperation, not just on the sea, proved elusive, even though Stalin, the world leader of Communism, paradoxically was serving as Britain’s main bulwark against the spread of Communism: he was trying to force the Chinese Communists to help free Chiang and resume the coalition with the Nationalists against Japan, and having the Comintern direct the Spanish Communists to remain under the wing of the Popular Front government against Franco.

At the same time, Stalin ordered the Comintern to have the Spanish Communists intensify the “complete and final annihilation” of the Spanish “Trotskyites” as “agents of fascism.”³¹⁶ Spain’s Communists, with the collusion of the anarchists, forced the POUM leader, Andreu Nin, out of the Catalan regional government.³¹⁷ (The next month, Spain’s Communists would set upon the anarchists, too, arresting or assassinating their leaders.) Koltsov’s reportage in Pravda continued to fixate not on Franco but on the POUM, noting (December 17, 1936) that “the purge of the Trotskyite and anarcho-syndicalist elements” in Spain “will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR.”³¹⁸ Koltsov soon infiltrated the POUM to write a hatchet piece; in an especially piquant passage, he would assert that the POUM newspaper (La Batalla) had “found its sole object of hatred and daily attack . . . not General Franco, not General Mola, not Italian and German fascism, but the Soviet Union.” Koltsov also wrote how Trotsky was supposedly giving directives to the POUM and how the POUM “had restructured in the usual Trotskyite fashion” in order to engage in “terrorism” (“provocations, raids, and murders”). He accused the POUM “Trotskyites” of attracting only riffraff and scum.³¹⁹

Tens of thousands of workers and people’s militias who were sacrificing their lives to save the Republic were cowards and fascist hirelings.

That December of 1936, Stalin again suffered from a high temperature, as well as tonsillitis. It had been a while since he had countenanced medical observation. His staff summoned Dr. Ivan Valedinsky to the Near Dacha. Valedinsky, who had not seen Stalin since 1931, brought a heart specialist, Vladimir Vinogradov, and a throat infection specialist, Boris Preobrazhensky. They diagnosed a reemergence of follicular angina from arteriosclerosis. The elevated temperature lasted five days.³²⁰ But Stalin hosted a Kremlin reception for top NKVD operatives on December 20, 1936, the nineteenth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka, and that same day attended a congress of wives of Red Army commanders in the Grand Kremlin Palace. On December 21, he celebrated his official fifty-seventh birthday with his inner circle, the military brass, and relatives, but without his children. “A mass of guests,” Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary, “all dressed up, noisy, lively, dancing to the radio, went home toward 7:00 a.m.”³²¹

The dictator had managed some official business that day. In a letter to Prime Minister Largo Caballero, dated December 21, Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov reiterated that they wanted to “prevent the enemies of Spain from regarding it as a Communist Republic” and offered political advice, as if to a pupil (“Pay attention to the peasants” and “Draw the petite and middle urban bourgeoisie onto the side of the government”). “It is quite possible,” the message noted, “that in Spain, the parliamentary road will prove more appropriate toward revolutionary development than was the case in Russia.”³²² The message dripped with Marxist revisionism. Consider that an evolutionary path somehow bringing about socialism was precisely what the Italian Comintern official Palmiro Togliatti believed in—and he was referred to in Soviet ciphered telegrams as “Kautsky,” the German Social Democrat whom Lenin had denounced.³²³

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Hermann Göring had invited Surits to his home on Leipziger Platz, according to the Soviet envoy, and on December 14, 1936, he delivered a monologue about Germany’s Four-Year Plan and how bilateral economic relations “should be built without regard to the state of our political relations,” that is, “apoliticized.” Göring allowed that some items on the list submitted by Kandelaki could be purchased, but most could have been expected only to elicit a negative response: no state could sell such top-secret objects to another. Surits protested. Göring mollified him, citing Bismarck regarding the need for strong ties between Germany and Russia.³²⁴ Ten days later, Kandelaki and a colleague met fruitlessly with Schacht (whose star had waned with Göring’s rise over the economy). To the now perpetual Soviet inquiries about a political rapprochement, Schacht retorted that it would be possible if the Soviets ended their “encirclement” of Germany by quitting Spain, France (in the guise of the Popular Front), and Czechoslovakia (the mutual assistance pact). Kandelaki returned to Moscow for consultations. The Soviet hopes incited by Göring’s elevation to plenipotentiary looked illusory.

Mongolia served as Stalin’s other linchpin in Soviet eastern defense, alongside China, and on December 23, 1936, he received yet another delegation from the livestock-herding nation, led by the new prime minister, Anandyn Amar, in Molotov’s office. “In olden times the Mongols beat the Chinese,” Stalin said. “Defending themselves against you, they built the Great Chinese Wall.” Amar: “All the territory up to the Great Chinese Wall belonged to us, Mongols.” Voroshilov (smiling): “You have imperialist aims.”³²⁵ The Soviets would have to spend still more money to shore up its feeble satellite.

In China, Zhou Enlai, aware of the Communists’ utter dependence on the Soviet Union for weapons and supplies, was shrewd enough to follow Stalin’s orders, not Mao’s. Zhou also enjoyed unusual sway with Zhang, who listened to few others. Chiang, however, refused to negotiate his release by agreeing to a renewed united front. British and U.S. military attachés who went to Xi’an encouraged Chiang to draw out the standoff, and he gave hints that he might order resumption of his encirclement campaign. But the generalissimo finally relented. One source of pressure was his wayward son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who had denounced his father as an enemy and, with his Russian wife, was studying in the Soviet Union—that is, he was in Stalin’s hands. A telegram was sent to the Chinese Communists stressing that in talks with Chiang the possible return of his son should be mentioned. On December 25 morning, Chiang belatedly received Zhou, who saluted his former commander, a sign of Communist obedience, and, on verbal promises of a renewed united front, agreed to his release.³²⁶ As Chiang prepared to depart Xi’an, at 2:00 p.m. on December 26, a coolie appeared, carrying a suitcase, followed by a guilt-ridden Zhang, who announced that he was surrendering and wanted to accompany Chiang and his entourage back to Nanking. Chiang appears to have pardoned him.³²⁷ They took off in Zhang’s Boeing, Chiang sitting in the copilot’s seat.

Chiang had been right about the upside of his risky visit to Xi’an: throngs cheered his return to the Nanking capital that December 26. (Two months later, Chiang would compare his ordeal at Xi’an with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.)³²⁸ His inner circle now urged him to go on the offensive and wipe out the Communists once and for all.³²⁹ The three Communist armies in the northern Shaanxi region totaled perhaps 50,000 troops, of whom fewer than 30,000 possessed weapons, and they had no air force. Chiang’s armies numbered more than 2 million, of whom 300,000 had been trained by the Germans (many carried German-made weapons), with 314 fighter planes and 600 pilots. His political authority was also colossal. But the generalissimo’s proven ability for treachery yielded before his recognition of China’s need for foreign assistance, and he honored the promise he made to Zhou and Zhang to carry out Stalin’s united front policy. Chiang assigned specific territory to the Communists and funded their separate administration and army, controlled by Mao. Stalin held Chiang’s son to ensure the promises were kept.³³⁰

Had Chiang been killed, Chinese accommodation with Japan, at Soviet expense, was a likely outcome. With Chiang’s death, the top Nationalist officials Wang Jingwei, who strenuously opposed cooperation with the USSR, and He Yingqin, China’s war minister, a graduate of the Japanese Military Academy and one of the key architects of the civil war against the Communists, could have established a new government to cooperate with Japan. (Zhang Qun, the foreign minister in Chiang’s government, had also been educated in Japan.) This could have resulted in a Japanese thrust northward, into Soviet territory, instead of southward in Asia—and therefore no Pearl Harbor or war with the United States.³³¹

Conversely, had Chiang not gone to Xi’an and been kidnapped and ultimately released, he would likely have crushed the Chinese Communists and killed or chased Mao out to Mongolia or Siberia, without forfeiting Stalin’s military aid. In the event, not only Chiang but also the Chinese Communists survived, even thrived, becoming more associated publicly with the national anti-Japanese struggle. These would prove to be momentous developments.

“POPPYCOCK”

On December 30, 1936, Stalin sent Bukharin a New Year’s “gift”: a packet of others’ “testimony” incriminating him in foul deeds.³³² Stalin also held a banquet for his physicians and, amid toasts to Soviet medicine, suddenly announced that there were enemies among the doctors. Molotov stood and thanked the physician-professors for helping to make Stalin better while attributing his recovery to the dictator’s robust constitution. After dinner, Stalin brought in a Radiola for dancing.³³³ Meanwhile, the January 1937 editorial of The Communist International, written in Stalin’s signature style of questions and answers, pointedly noted that “the Spanish Trotskyites conduct themselves like the advanced guard of the notorious ‘fifth column’ of Franco insurgents. Is it possible to support the heroic struggle of the Spanish popular masses without fighting against the traitorous Trotskyite band? No, it is impossible.”³³⁴ La Batalla, the POUM’s organ, responded that “Stalin is destroying, without looking back, everything that opposes him. . . . Stalin maintains his incontestable power with terror.”³³⁵

Stalin also managed to flush Trotsky out of Norway. As a condition of his asylum, Trotsky was under a gag order. But while he had been away from Oslo for that fishing holiday, the house where he lived had been set upon by fascist thugs led by Major Vidkun Quisling, and in Moscow Trotsky was being convicted in absentia of political terror. He now acceded to the insistent requests for interviews. “Trotsky declares that the Moscow charges are invented and fabricated,” the headlines screamed in the Norwegian press. Litvinov demanded that Norway rescind Trotsky’s asylum; the Soviets hinted that they would cease importing Norwegian herring. The Norwegian Labor government caved, placing Trotsky under house arrest. The government in Mexico offered him asylum, and he arrived there by ship on January 9, 1937. Trotsky was given use of a villa known as the Blue House, designed by the painter Diego Rivera as an inspirational refuge amid wildflowers and squawking parrots.³³⁶ The quasimodernist, quasirustic compound, tended by servants, was located on Avenida Londres in the Mexico City suburb of Coyoacán.³³⁷ Here, the NKVD’s efforts to assassinate Trotsky resumed.

On January 8, Stalin had received Lion Feuchtwanger in the Little Corner. The dictator used these conversations with foreign sympathizers as mental calisthenics.³³⁸ The German writer opened with a question about the glaring absence of criticism of the regime by Soviet intellectuals. Stalin did not deny it. “Up to 1933, few writers believed the peasant question could be solved on the basis of collective farms,” he said. “There is no more of that criticism. Facts persuade. The wager of Soviet power on collectivization was won. . . . The problem of the mutual relations between the working class and the peasantry was the most important and has furnished the most worries to revolutionaries in all countries. The problem looked insoluble: the peasantry, reactionary, linked with private property, dragged backwards; the working class went forward. This contradiction undermined revolutions more than once. That’s how the revolution in France [Paris Commune] perished in 1871.”³³⁹

Feuchtwanger, telling Stalin he came across as modest, inquired of the adulation, “Is this not an extra burden on you?” Stalin: “I am in complete agreement with you. It’s unpleasant when they exaggerate to hyperbolic scale.” Attributing great strides to one individual, he explained, “is, of course, wrong—what can one person do?—[but] they see in me a unifying concept, and create foolish raptures around me.” Beyond the masses, Stalin explained in this unscripted moment that Soviet functionaries “are afraid if they do not have a bust of Stalin, then either the newspaper or their superior will curse them, or a visitor will take notice. This is careerism, a form of bureaucrat ‘self-defense’: in order not to be touched, they must install a bust of Stalin. Every party that is victorious attracts alien elements, careerists. They try to defend themselves by mimicry: they install busts, they write slogans in which they do not believe.”³⁴⁰

The conversation turned to the public trial of “Trotskyites,” and Stalin tried to convey that domestic oppositionists and foreign imperialist powers had to be working together: after all, they wanted the same outcome. “They are for the USSR’s defeat in war against Hitler and the Japanese,” he said, promising that a pending new trial would reveal how oppositionists were connected to the Gestapo and negotiating with Hess, the deputy Führer. “For the power they would obtain in the downfall of the USSR in a war,” he averred, the opposition had planned to “make concessions to capitalism: concede territory to Germany (Ukraine or a part thereof), to Japan (the Soviet Far East or a part thereof); open a wide path for German capital in the European part of the USSR, for Japanese capital in the Asian part . . . disband the greater part of the collective farms and allow ‘private initiative,’ as they express it, [and] reduce the state control over industry.”

Feuchtwanger inquired whether the Soviet Union would publish the additional trial materials besides the confessions. Stalin: “What materials?” Feuchtwanger: “The results of the preliminary investigation. Everything that proves their guilt aside from confessions.” Stalin: “Kirov was killed; this is a fact. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky were not there. But people implicated them for the crime, as inspirers of it. All of them are experienced conspirators—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. They do not leave behind such documents. When people caught them out in the confrontations [with witnesses], they had to admit their guilt.” Stalin continued: “They say that people testify because they are promised their freedom. This is nonsense. These are all experienced people; they fully understand what it means to testify against oneself.” At the same time, Stalin circumscribed the danger, noting that of the approximately 17,000 party members who had voted for the opposition platform in 1927, “there were 8,000 to 10,000 of them left.”³⁴¹

Stalin, under questioning, justified the new constitution’s emphasis on democracy. “We do not just have democracy carried over from bourgeois countries,” he told Feuchtwanger. “We have an unusual democracy, we have an addition: the word ‘socialist’ democracy.” Stalin allowed that capitalism’s lesser form of democracy was more progressive than fascism, and that the global popular front against fascism “is a struggle for democracy.”³⁴² Still, he went on to note that in October 1917, many people in Russia had been afraid of the pending seizure of power, in 1918 of the Brest-Litovsk peace, in 1928–32 of collectivization, and now they were scared of fascism. “Fascism,” Stalin stated, “is poppycock. It is a temporary phenomenon.”³⁴³

NOISY NEW TRIAL

Determinations of who was an “enemy” were being made locally. Officials strained to protect their own people, while still demonstrating zeal. But Stalin began to go after provincial party bosses who had never been in any opposition. On January 2, 1937, Sheboldayev, party boss of the Azov–Black Sea region, was dismissed amid accusations of “Trotskyite wreckers in the party organization.” On January 13, the Kiev provincial party committee was deemed “littered with an exceedingly great number of Trotskyites,” and three days later Postyshev was replaced as Kiev province secretary by Sergei Kudryavtsev, while the Kharkov provincial party boss was replaced by Nikolai Gikalo. Both would press the destruction of sitting party officials.³⁴⁴ Meanwhile, Stalin had Bukharin summoned to a confrontation with Radek and Pyatakov, who were delivered from prison. Bukharin told his wife that Radek had denounced him as a spy and terrorist with whom he had plotted Stalin’s murder, and that Pyatakov resembled a “skeleton with its teeth knocked out.”³⁴⁵

Also on January 13, Mao moved from his hideout in the caves near Bao’an back to the town of Yan’an (pop. 3,000), the now legally acknowledged Red capital, where, in a mountain valley surrounded by fortress walls and towers, the Communists occupied the former residences of landowners and merchants. In the Little Corner on January 19, two directives were finalized. One criticized the Chinese Communists for working to split the Nationalists. The second ordered them to reorganize governance in the areas under their control from “soviets” to a “national revolutionary” front of all “democratic” forces, renounce land confiscations, and “direct serious attention to the machinations of Trotskyite elements, who in Xi’an, as in all of China, try to undermine the cause of the united anti-Japanese front with their provocational activities and are servants of the Japanese aggressors.”³⁴⁶ Mao would slow-walk any second united front. The Comintern gave the Chinese Communists more than $800,000 and promised a similar sum to come.³⁴⁷

On January 23, 1937, a second trial in Moscow of a parallel “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center” opened, like the first, in the October Hall, after Stalin had hand-edited the charges.³⁴⁸ Ten of the seventeen defendants worked in Orjonikidze’s heavy industry commissariat.³⁴⁹ “And here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes,” Pyatakov publicly confessed, “bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.” Yezhov had personally forced his erstwhile drinking buddy, in thirty-three days of torture, to capitulate to accusations of Trotskyism and plotting with Germany.³⁵⁰ (Yezhov was finally named to the highest rank, “general commissar of state security.”)³⁵¹ Radek, in court, delivered a tour de force fabricated history of Trotskyism. His “features,” an American correspondent observed, “seemed curiously out of focus, his teeth charred and uneven, his eyes very much alive behind thick glasses.”³⁵² Soviet newspapers and radio afforded wire-to-wire coverage, accompanied by orchestrated meetings at factories and farms. “Why such a great fuss over the trial?” Feuchtwanger would ask Dimitrov. “Incomprehensible. An atmosphere has been created of extreme unrest among the population, mutual suspicion, denunciations, and so forth. Trotskyism has been killed—why such a campaign?”³⁵³

Feuchtwanger found the allegations preposterous. And yet the oppositionists had organized a conspiratorial meeting, in summer 1932, at Zinoviev’s dacha, where expelled party members of the Leningrad opposition had discussed reviving their old links to Trotsky. A message from Trotsky to join forces had been carried into the Soviet Union. Stalin was also correct that the NKVD (then the OGPU) had missed these contacts, which was evidently part of the basis for his statement, in the September 1936 dismissal of Yagoda, that the NKVD was four years behind.³⁵⁴ Of course, this was a pathetic “bloc” incapable of consequential action (Smirnov, a supposed organizer of the conspiracy to murder Kirov in 1934, had been in prison since 1933).³⁵⁵ But the meeting was not an invention. The “terror” charges, too, contained the minutest kernel of truth. After a decree had rescinded Trotsky’s Soviet citizenship, he had written a spirited open letter to the central executive committee of the Soviet (which had nominal jurisdiction over citizenship) asserting that “Stalin has led us to a cul-de-sac. . . . It is necessary, at last, to carry out Lenin’s last insistent advice: remove Stalin.”³⁵⁶ Trotsky had not written “remove by assassination,” but how else could it be done?³⁵⁷

In the middle of the trial, on January 26, Shumyatsky showed Stalin and the inner circle a special newsreel of the dictator’s speech on the new constitution at the recent Eighth all-Union Extraordinary Congress of Soviets. The film depicted the Spassky Tower with its clock, the Grand Kremlin Palace interior, the congress delegates, Stalin’s appearance and the resulting ovation with shouts of hurrah, and then his entire speech, accompanied by documentary footage of Soviet achievements—factories, collective farms, the military, culture. This was the first time Stalin had been filmed in sound. “After it ended they applauded for a long time,” Shumyatsky noted. “I[osif] V[issarionovich] said: ‘It turned out to be good stuff, and you know, I had wanted to burn the negative when you previewed the fragments.’”³⁵⁸

Stalin was also reading the screenplay for A Great Citizen, by Friedrich Ermler (in collaboration with Manuel Bolshintsov and Mikhail Bleiman), based on the life and assassination of Kirov, who in the film was known as Pyotr Shakhov, the party secretary of an unspecified region. Stalin (January 27, 1937) praised the screenplay to Shumyatsky—“it is politically literate, no question. The literary achievements are also indisputable”—but wanted changes, complaining that the party opposition seemed to have a longer party membership than the members of the Central Committee (“reality gives the opposite picture”). Stalin also wrote that “references to Stalin must be eliminated” in favor of “the Central Committee.” The film’s assassin (Bryantsev) was depicted as a former Trotskyite who, after the defeat of the opposition, wormed his way into the position of director of the Museum of the Revolution. Stalin proposed that the suspense be shifted from Shakhov’s assassination to the larger forces behind it, instructing that “the struggle between the Trotskyites and the Soviet government should not resemble a struggle between two coteries for power, one of which ‘got lucky’ in the fight, the other ‘did not,’” but a struggle between two programs: the socialist program, supported by the people, versus a Trotskyite program “for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR,” at the behest of fascism that was “repudiated by the people.”³⁵⁹ He further demanded that the murder scene itself be excised (Ermler would instead shoot a dark corridor, with the sound of the gun going off).³⁶⁰

On January 28, 1937, Dimitrov had sent yet another telegram to Mao, reporting on the new trial in Moscow and concluding, “We await information on your concrete measures in the struggle against Trotskyites.”³⁶¹ On the evening of the 29th, Orjonikidze visited his former first deputy Pyatakov in prison for the last time and observed his utterly smashed face. Several hours later, at 3:00 a.m. on the 30th, Vasily Ulrich read out the prearranged verdict at the trial: thirteen death sentences, including Pyatakov; four others convicted but not to be executed, including Radek (ten years of penal labor).³⁶² The party machine turned out a crowd on Red Square, reported at 200,000, in temperatures of 16 degrees below zero (27 below Celsius), for speeches by Khrushchev and Shvernik. The masses carried banners demanding immediate executions, which had already been implemented.³⁶³

In Berlin on the 29th, Kandelaki had passed to Schacht a proposal in Litvinov’s name for political negotiations between diplomatic representatives, agreeing to treat them “as confidential and not to divulge anything, . . . if this is what the German government demands.”³⁶⁴ But Hitler’s speeches more and more resembled declarations of war. “Any further treaty connections with the present Bolshevist Russia would be completely worthless for us,” he told the Reichstag on the fourth anniversary of his chancellorship, on January 30. “It is out of the question that National Socialist Germany could ever be bound to protect Bolshevism or that we, on our side, could ever agree to accept the assistance of a Bolshevist state. For I fear that the moment any nation agreed to accept such assistance, it would thereby seal its own doom.”

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SOME ANALYSTS HAVE SPECULATED that Stalin used Spain in a war of wills with Hitler and Mussolini, a dramatic idea not supported by any evidence.³⁶⁵ Others have asserted that, despite the long distance and difficult logistics, Stalin aimed to create a Communist regime on the Iberian Peninsula, precisely the opposite of what abundant evidence proves.³⁶⁶ Still others have concluded that he pursued a Republic victory—which, for a time, he did.³⁶⁷ His predicament was bizarre. He was the one who had saved the “bourgeois” democrat Chiang Kai-shek from execution by Chinese Communists and was defending “bourgeois” democracy in Spain against fascist aggression and Communist subversion. Working to prevent a Franco triumph put Stalin at loggerheads not only with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, but also France and Britain. The Soviet dictator appears not to have been the least anxious about keeping in good standing with the latter, to maintain the declared policy of “collective security.” But there are indications he suspected that the momentum of aggressive right-wing regimes in Europe would tempt Britain and France, under the influence of their own right-wing circles, into a self-protective international coalition with “fascism,” at Soviet expense.³⁶⁸

The British had signed a declaration with Italy pledging to “respect the status quo on the Mediterranean” (which further complicated already difficult Soviet shipments to Republic Spain).³⁶⁹ “He who sups with the devil,” Izvestiya had huffed at Britain’s accommodation of the Italian fascists, “should have a long spoon” (January 5, 1937).³⁷⁰ What is more, Stalin learned—from intercepted and decoded U.S. State Department communications—that Britain was preparing to demand from the Soviet Union the creation of a classical liberal-conservative, rather than Republican-socialist, government in Spain, and, “if Moscow refuses, then cut a deal with Germany and Italy.” That ultimatum never came, but Britain was seeking accommodation with Germany over Spain.³⁷¹ France also stepped up its efforts to overcome mutual hostility with Germany. The fear that the bourgeois-democratic capitalists (Britain, France) were keen to align with the fascist-capitalists (Germany, Italy, and a Francoist Spain) haunted Stalin.

His determination to counter the perceived danger of a Trotskyite beachhead on Spanish Republic territory, as well as Trotsky’s relentless barrage of writings about the betrayal of the revolution, cannot be separated from these geopolitical concerns. Indeed, Trotskyism for Stalin was a geopolitical concern.³⁷² Trotskyites in Spain were few, insignificant, and under venomous attack even from Trotsky. But Stalin had a darkly expansive view of threats.³⁷³ Moreover, Trotsky, though a single person, reached a worldwide audience. At the same time, Stalin would not have been Stalin had he not also perceived a threat as a grand opportunity. He had no more instigated the kidnapping of Chiang in China than he had the putsch by Sanjurjo, Mola, and Franco in Spain, but he had turned both actions to his advantage. The apparent necessity of preventing Trotskyism in Spain would conveniently provide Stalin with vivid justification for his annihilation of “enemies” at home as well. He transformed his Spanish challenge into a domestic cudgel. The place of Trotsky inside Stalin’s head was immense, and Trotsky was occupying a similar enormity in the consciousness of the entire country and, to some extent, Spain—both nemesis and ever-handy instrument. But it also began with Stalin’s determination to smash his inner circle, his instinct to bully and humiliate turning ever more vicious.