Stalin

When Frinovsky’s squad raked over Yagoda’s Kremlin apartment (Miliutinsky Lane, 9) and his sumptuous dacha (Ozerki), they found 1,229 bottles of wine (the majority of foreign origin and dating to as early as 1897), 11,075 cigarettes of foreign make (Turkish and Egyptian), along with 8 boxes of foreign tobacco, 3,904 pornographic photos and 11 pornographic films, 21 men’s overcoats, mostly foreign made, plus 4 fur coats and 4 leather overcoats, 11 foreign-made leather jackets, 22 men’s suits, 31 pairs of imported women’s shoes, and 22,997 rubles. The list went on (and on): 399 foreign music records, 101 imported children’s games, 37 pairs of imported gloves, 17 large carpets, 7 medium-size carpets, 5 animal skin carpets (bear, leopard, wolf), a collection of 165 pipes (including some made of elephant tusks), 95 bottles of imported perfume, 542 examples of Trotskyite and fascist literature.¹⁰¹ Only the infamous foreign jewelry Yagoda and his minion Alexander Lurye used to entrap foreigners and enrich themselves had failed to turn up. Word of the eye-popping inventory advanced through the rumor mill, further discrediting Yagoda and his closest associates.¹⁰²

Yagoda was charged with embezzlement and leading a conspiracy on behalf of Nazi Germany to assassinate Stalin. Had Yagoda been a long-standing foreign agent, he let pass countless opportunities to have Stalin and entourage killed (such as the night of the Kirov assassination, when, as Yagoda knew, Stalin and his clique were all together on a train to Leningrad).

No one in Stalin’s inner circle would defend Yagoda, who had relentlessly intruded into their commissariats and persecuted their personnel. “I repeat: I knew Voroshilov hated me,” Yagoda would soon be quoted as testifying, when asked why he supposedly felt compelled to eavesdrop on Stalin’s telephone conversations. “Molotov and Kaganovich held me in the same hostile regard.”¹⁰³ The cronies were not so naïve as to imagine Yagoda had launched these proctology exams on their institutions of his own accord, but they could imagine that he had lobbied Stalin for his own initiatives to make their lives miserable. Kaganovich compared Yagoda with Joseph Fouché, the French Revolution’s unscrupulous secret policeman who managed to survive four regimes (Jacobins, Directory, Napoleon, the Restoration) and became associated with counterrevolution.¹⁰⁴ Yagoda lacked a prerevolutionary Bolshevik underground past. “My whole life I went about with a mask,” Yagoda was recorded as confessing, in interrogation protocols, “making myself out to be a staunch Bolshevik. In fact, in its real understanding, I was never a Bolshevik.” Stalin underlined this passage, among others.¹⁰⁵ (An interrogation transcript of Avel Yenukidze arrived the same day as Yagoda’s.) It is almost as if the endless hours of interrogations, and the lengthy written and signed protocols, were for him.

Other stunning arrests followed: the head of the NKVD special department for security in the military, Mark Gai, and the head of Stalin’s bodyguards, Pauker.¹⁰⁶ They and many more were “unmasked” as fascist spies plotting to assassinate the leadership. Pauker could have withdrawn the Kremlin guard, leaving Stalin exposed. But he did not have to go to that trouble: Pauker shaved Stalin and could have slit his throat. Back when Yagoda had been sacked from the NKVD, Pauker had been the one to block his access to Stalin’s dacha in Sochi, and now, just a few months later, he was supposed to have been been in a conspiracy with Yagoda against Stalin all along? Yezhov went further still, asserting to the NKVD bosses that “[Zakhar] Volovich, Pauker’s deputy, specially planted an engineer, a German spy, as the head of the secret government telephone station. In such a way did the enemy learn of the telephone conversations between Stalin and Molotov.”¹⁰⁷

The fabrications and the beating of people to unconsciousness to extract pre-scripted testimony of assassination “plots” did, for some Chekists, violate professional pride. But the problem for them was not that, or not that alone; rather, they had all worked with Yagoda. Why had they not spoken earlier? Were they secretly in league with him? Operatives who initially survived Yagoda’s sacking now became still more “vigilant”: that is, they attempted to ward off their own arrests, magnifying the slaughterhouse. Back in February 1937, Yakov Agranov—the first deputy NKVD chief, who had taken over state security (GB) from the arrested Molchanov—had asked regional NKVD branches for lists of operatives and other staff who had been Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and rightists.¹⁰⁸ But in spring 1937, Agranov would be demoted to Saratov province. There, he proceeded to extract “confessions” left and right, including from his immediate local predecessor, Roman Pilar von Pilhau, who confessed to trying to organize Yezhov’s assassination, the ultimate extracted accusation for someone like Agranov, seeking to ingratiate himself with the new boss. But with so many “Yagodaites” giving “testimony” under torture, denunciations against Agranov flowed like lava, and soon he, too, would be arrested.¹⁰⁹

Through it all, the NKVD never broke down, let alone rebelled. The ease with which Yagoda was destroyed proved that there was no threat whatsoever to Stalin’s rule. The secret police, even under assault, remained an utterly reliable instrument of his will, a testament to both the limits of the feared yet despised Yagoda’s authority and the strength of Stalin’s as supreme leader.

DEFT MANEUVERS

During the plenum of February 23–March 5, 1937, Voroshilov was given the floor at the March 2 morning session. Yezhov and Molotov had already delivered their reports on ubiquitous enemies. Stalin had considered assigning a separate report on the army but demurred. (“We had in mind the importance of the matter,” according to Molotov, meaning the possible consequences.) Instead, Voroshilov spoke during discussion of Kaganovich’s report, which covered sabotage on the railroads.¹¹⁰ The defense commissar was one of Stalin’s two most important minions.¹¹¹ He stood far closer to Stalin than any other military man or security official, having first met him in 1906 and having fought together with him during the civil war. But his position atop the massive Soviet military had hardly been foreordained. Back in November 1921, following bitter internal battles during the civil war over the shape of the military, he had begged Stalin to be released. “In Moscow I already told you of my intention to alter my field of play, and now I have firmly decided: I have grown tired of work in the military institution, and the center of gravity is not there now either,” a then thirty-year-old Voroshilov had written. “I submit that I would be more useful in the civilian sphere. I await approval and friendly support from you at the Central Committee for my transfer. I’d like to work in the Donbass, where I ask the Central Committee to send me. I’ll take any kind of work and I hope to buck up again, otherwise I’ll start to decay (spiritually) here. You should pity me. A strong embrace, your Voroshilov.”¹¹² Instead, within four years Stalin had named Voroshilov defense commissar.

As of June 21, 1935, the arrest of any officer from platoon level up required the approval of the defense commissar, which put Voroshilov front and center in Stalin’s terror.

Stalin prized Voroshilov’s canine fealty and avuncular sociability. A connoisseur of the opera, Voroshilov discovered a fondness for posing for oil portraits, too, sitting for long periods in the studio of Alexander Gerasimov. Gossip made the rounds that Voroshilov had acquired yet another villa (his third), at state expense, expressly for a ballerina, even as he reprimanded those below for doing the same.¹¹³ The erstwhile metalworker and his wife, Golda Gorbman, a convert from Judaism who went by the name Yekaterina Voroshilova, had turned their apartment in the Grand Kremlin Palace into the regime’s social epicenter.¹¹⁴ Voroshilov was stormy and sentimental, given to tears even more readily than Franco, but, like the Spanish general, he had never acquired genuine military training. He had not served in the tsarist army, despite being the right age. Unlike the standouts Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and Uborevičius, Voroshilov had not been sent to study in Germany (although he had visited and met with top German officers). He usually chastised commanders as if their mistakes surprised him, and doled out praise, while marking milestones and awards with personal letters. Still, Voroshilov could not stanch the chitchat about his military incompetence.

Ivan Kutyakov, a party member since 1917 and the person who had taken command of the famous Chapayev’s unit when the latter fell in 1919, recorded in his diary in 1937 that, “as long as ‘the iron one’ is in charge, we will have misconception, bootlicking, and everything stupid will be valued, everything smart will be devalued.”¹¹⁵ Kutyakov was too far from the center of power to understand that Voroshilov was a shrewd political operator who had developed a certain bureaucratic-procedural mastery, with which he had often kept the wolves of the NKVD’s special department at bay, dismissing requests for arrest authorization with phrases like “It’s not obligatory to arrest every fool; one can simply toss them from the Red Army.”¹¹⁶ But Kutyakov did understand that the fate not just of the top officers who looked down on Voroshilov but of the entire Red Army lay in the commissar’s hands.

At the plenum, Voroshilov once more demonstrated his skillfulness as a crowd-pleasing orator. “Lazar Moiseyevich [Kaganovich], before I took the podium, said, ‘Let’s see how you will criticize yourself—that’ll be interesting.’ (General laughter.),” Voroshilov noted, before proceeding to sharply distinguish his area of responsibility from transport. “In the Worker-Peasant Red Army at the current moment, fortunately or unfortunately, and, I think, to grand fortune, we have not so far uncovered especially many enemies of the people,” he asserted. He did not deny their presence but spent a great deal of time on the past, especially how Trotsky in the early 1920s had supposedly tried but failed to rally the army against the party and how, “without noise, and that was not necessary, we threw out a large number of unfit elements, including the Trotskyite-Zinovievite tail, including all manner of dubious riffraff.” Specifically, he noted, “we cleaned out some 47,000 over the course of 12 to 13 years,” almost half of them (22,000) just in the years 1934–36, including 5,000 “oppositionists.” Around 10,000 of the discharges had been arrested, but few had been higher-ups. And tens of thousands of new officers, graduates of twelve military academies, as well as engineers, doctors, and political workers, were newly promoted. “The country gives it its best sons,” Voroshilov concluded, and it “constitutes an armed force ready to fight and loyal to the party and state.” He also reminded everyone of the army’s singular importance (“the whole world is against us”).¹¹⁷

Voroshilov’s was a command performance. His assertion that there were few foreign agents or saboteurs in his bailiwick was precisely what his close friend Orjonikidze had been saying about heavy industry before his suicide. Like Orjonikidze (and others), Voroshilov fully shared Stalin’s worldview but lacked the paranoiac bent or iron willingness to murder loyalists for some purported larger political end. And, despite Orjonikidze’s manifest failure to protect industry, Voroshilov had not relinquished his delusion that he might deflect the guillotine from the Red Army. But he was subjected to intense pressure. Molotov had interjected, “If you think that situation in your area is fine and dandy, you’re profoundly misguided.”¹¹⁸ Also, a contingent of military men was in attendance (Tukhachevsky, oddly, was absent, rumored to be on holiday in Sochi), and several railed against enemies, looking to save their own skins.¹¹⁹ Nor could Voroshilov avoid having to convoke a follow-up meeting of the commanders to discuss the “lessons” of the plenum. He dared to tell them that “our main enemy is there, in the West, . . . the capitalists, the imperialists”—not in the hall where he was speaking. But as Voroshilov hesitated to denounce his own officer corps, others rushed in.¹²⁰

Grigory Kulik, a peasant-born cavalry officer resentful of the noble-born Tukhachevsky and his ilk, had just returned from Spain and wrote to Voroshilov (April 29, 1937) demanding that enemies in the military be rooted out because “as a Bolshevik I do not wish that the precious blood of our people is spilled in a future war in excess because of careerists, hidden traitors, and talentless commanders.” This was a self-characterization, albeit unintentionally so. But Kulik’s vicious ambition ratcheted up the pressure on Voroshilov. (Kulik very soon attained his first audience in the Little Corner; Stalin promoted him to chief of artillery administration.)¹²¹ Another immense point of pressure was that the Red Army personnel department required autobiographies, on which had been introduced a new question (in 1936): “With whom have you worked?” Trotsky had headed the army until January 1925—and who had not “worked” with him? Almost none of these men had been personally close to him, but they had the fatal association. Even those lucky enough to have joined after Trotsky’s dismissal could still be brought low by the required autobiography in their own hand: all of a sudden, some person they knew would be arrested, and they would be liable for their association with an “enemy” and for having failed to report such an enemy, which was a capital crime.¹²²

Above all, Voroshilov had no control over Yezhov, who hungered for Stalin’s approval. In the Little Corner, the despot tutored Yezhov on portraying a conspiracy with a shadow government, ready to take over: Yagoda as head of the Council of People’s Commissars, Tukhachevsky as defense commissar, Bukharin as general secretary of the party. (One wonders what went through the minds of those present at official discussions of such a prospect.) Their palace coup, on behalf of foreign powers, was said to involve Pauker, assisted by former Kremlin commandant Rudolf Peterson (sacked back in the Yenukidze affair), who were collectively going to help cut the Kremlin lights and toss grenades into the special cinema during a politburo viewing. (Another variant had them smushing poison onto Kremlin telephone receivers.)¹²³ Voroshilov was not going to defend the manifestly more talented Tukhachevsky, whom he despised, against Stalin’s machinations, but what the defense commissar might not have fully understood was how indulging Tukhachevsky’s annihilation could break open the bloodgates on the beloved army he was trying to protect.¹²⁴

POPULAR FRONT ON THE RIGHT, CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT

No general war had broken out over Spain because none of the major powers wanted one. Spain might have been the world’s great cause, on one side or the other, but it was no outside country’s principal concern. The global morality play, in fact, was deceiving. “I know that there are some people who believe that as the outcome of this civil war Spain inevitably must have a government either fascist or Communist,” Anthony Eden, then Britain’s foreign secretary, had told a Foreign Press Association dinner in early 1937. “That is not our belief. On the contrary, we believe that neither of these forms of government being indigenous to Spain, neither is likely to endure. Spain will in time evolve her own Spanish form of government.” These self-serving remarks had a certain prescience.¹²⁵

Nor were the often lurid rumors accurate. Nationalist agents had learned and leaked word of the Spanish Republic gold transfer to the “Reds” in Moscow, provoking an international scandal, as well as a steep drop in the peseta’s value, which raised the costs of imports, but the holdings in Moscow were being used to pay down the Republic’s imports of expensive weaponry.¹²⁶ Moscow gouged the Spaniards on the prices charged for some weapons (and charged for shipment). Even as the ruble held steady against the dollar, at 5.3 to $1, in transactions with Spain the Soviets converted the ruble at anywhere from 2.0 to 3.95 to $1, after which they then made the conversion of the ruble prices into pesetas; the Spaniards never saw the original ruble conversion rate. This chicanery probably added at least 25 percent to the prices Spain paid for Soviet weaponry. Still, the value of the Soviet weapons delivered did reach a substantial approximation of the value of gold the Soviets took in.¹²⁷

Hitler, following Franco’s failure to capture Madrid, had decided neither to increase nor to decrease his circumscribed commitment, but Mussolini had expanded the already expansive Italian contribution, thereby perhaps helping to prevent a Nationalist collapse. In February 1937, when Italy had nearly 50,000 troops on the ground in Spain, Mussolini had also dispatched Roberto Farinacci as a personal envoy. Farinacci tried to talk Franco into creating a fascist-style monopoly party and perhaps name a House of Savoy prince as king of Spain. But the more Farinacci saw, the more he was put off by the infighting and corruption. He judged Franco to be “timid,” and characterized his massacres of political prisoners as “politically senseless.” The Nationalists’ secret police overheard Farinacci concluding that Mussolini would have to take over Spain and appoint him as proconsul.¹²⁸ Franco did adopt the slogan “Una Patria, Un Estado, Un Caudillo” (evoking “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer”), but there would be no Spanish fascist regime. When King Vittorio Emanuele had made Mussolini prime minister, back in 1922, the Italian fascist party counted 320,000 members, ten times the number of Spanish Falangists in 1936. Spain’s homegrown fascists would lose 60 percent of this not very robust membership in civil war combat.¹²⁹

Farinacci complained further to Rome that Franco “has no idea of what the Spain of tomorrow should be like,” an utterly mistaken assessment. Farinacci also wrote that Franco “is only interested in winning the war, and then for a long period after, in how to impose an authoritarian, or, better, dictatorial government to purge the nation of all those who have had any contact, direct or indirect, with the Reds,” an observation that was spot-on. Franco understood the civil war not solely as a military endeavor but as a political project. During his counterinsurgency in Morocco, he had learned how to massacre a populace into submission and how to manipulate tribal leaders, pitting them against one another or finding their price, making them dependent on him. Now, in a similar battlefield gradualism in the homeland—refusing all entreaties for a mediated peace, killing or chasing out implacable elements in the Spanish population en masse, training a keen eye on rival rebel officers—the caudillo baffled and infuriated his foreign fascist supporters. Yet the cuco Franco had a ready answer. “I will occupy Spain town by town, village by village, railway by railway,” he snapped at an impatient Italian ambassador. “Nothing will make me abandon this gradual program. It will bring me less glory but internal peace. . . . I can assure you that I am not interested in territory but in inhabitants. . . . I must have the certainty of being able to found a regime.”¹³⁰

Such a statement could be taken as excuse making for Franco’s mediocrity in the new conditions of modern combat, which required combined use of air, armor, and infantry (in German-style warfare, which Soviet advisers also knew). But a quick military conquest of Spain would not have been easy.¹³¹ Among the Soviet-sponsored International Brigades, casualty rates would be high, up to 75 percent in some units, while home leave was denied and desertion would become prevalent. But Spain’s regular Republic’s People’s Army had become formidable, the majority of its field commands held by regular officers, many of them accomplished. Franco, however, would win the grinding civil war not only because he attained a unified military command. On the political battlefield, as it were, he forged a loose but effective coalition, an integrative strategy of no enemies to the right, co-opting Spanish fascists, who were more housebroken than their Italian counterparts.¹³² Thus, whereas in Italy and then Germany the traditional right, fearing the left, had invited the radical right to power, in Spain Franco built a successful popular front—on the right.

Franco re-created the ancien régime court, with processions to church under a canopy surrounded by bishops.¹³³ Beneath this powerful symbolism, he also forced into being a single legal political organization, relying on his young brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer, who had escaped from a Republic prison, to oversee the political amalgam.¹³⁴ This was no simple feat: the monarchists alone were split, with more than one presumptive heir waiting in the wings.¹³⁵ But the Francoist political party managed to bring into coalition seemingly incompatible groupings of Alfonso monarchists and the Carlist monarchists, along with Catholics, upper officer corps, and the Falange Blueshirts. Fissures remained, but they were not enough to split the coalition, while being just enough to facilitate Franco’s staying power.

This contrasted starkly with the Republic. Many Spaniards suspected both indigenous Communists and Moscow of the worst, but with Communists working against broad nationalization of private industry, many of Spain’s shopkeepers, farmers, and lesser civil servants cooperated with them in defense of the Republic. Yet the Republic could not take full advantage. It lacked not only a vigorous parliamentary life during the civil war but unified leadership, comprising as it did three governments in three capitals: Valencia (after evacuation from Madrid), Bilbao (Basques), and Barcelona (the Catalan Generalitat). Anarchists, who were concentrated in Barcelona, pursued a strategy of winning the war via grassroots revolution, but in areas where revolution had been effected, the Nationalist rebel forces sliced through the lines with ease.¹³⁶ Even if the Nationalists had disintegrated, it is hard to see how the leftist victors could have avoided a civil war, which simmered and occasionally boiled on the left nearly the entire time they were battling Franco.¹³⁷

The Spanish left was irreparably divided against itself. Beyond the usual tableau of anarchist leaders and many anarchist rank and file splintering over issues, or the factions within the Communist movement treating one another as enemies, the Communists and the POUM wanted to eliminate each other, as did the Communists and the anarchists. No less an unbridgeable gulf existed between the Communists and the Socialists, who stood ready to kill each other (and not just in Spain). That and the other divisions help explain why Spain’s Republic would not win, despite holding the strategic interior, coasts, and many ports. Stalin did not initiate these profound mutual enmities. He contributed to them, but he also struggled to overcome them, refusing to indulge the calls for a Communist coup and insisting on upholding the Popular Front under the Socialist party prime minister.¹³⁸ But Communism was ultimately an either-or proposition. Put another way, Socialists could give up anticapitalism and become “meliorists” (or redistributionists) within a parliamentary market system; Communists could never do so and remain Communists. Thus, despite the soaring passion of the antifascist crusade, the leftist Popular Front was doomed.

As for Franco’s techniques of war (insurgency-cum-counterinsurgency) and his vicious yet relatively adroit authoritarian rule, Stalin paid no special mind. The despot understood himself not as just another caudillo, but as an ideas-based leader. In practical terms, Spain’s strong interest groups, and the need for Franco to not just manipulate but accommodate them, provided a stark contrast with the political terrain under the Soviet despot, who had crushed even the quasi-independence of his inner circle.¹³⁹ Franco, therefore, had nothing to teach him, except that a military-led putsch, assisted externally by fascists, could try to seize a whole country, a scenario that Stalin was manipulating to justify his own savage domestic counterinsurgency against an imaginary insurgency.

ELUSIVE GERMANY

In Moscow, the German Communist Wilhelm Pieck, at a meeting of the German commission of the Comintern secretariat on February 11, 1937, had contradicted Stalin’s adviser Jenő Varga, a Hungarian Communist. Pieck argued that “the German bourgeoisie will not decide to go to war, and has grave doubts about Hitler’s provocations, which he needs to raise his prestige.” Varga interjected: “You think the German bourgeoisie does not want war?” Pieck: “No, not now. . . . We have information that the German army generals are against the provocational policy conducted by Hitler.” Varga: “That means that the current fascist regime in Germany is not a regime of the haute bourgeoisie, the finance oligarchy, but Hitler’s regime?” Pieck answered that “finance capital had understood that it could not dominate the masses with the help of Weimar democracy, but that did not mean fascism was merely an instrument. It is a force unto itself; we need to evaluate it as an independent force.” Pieck claimed that he was not denying “finance capital’s” power, but arguing that it had everything to lose from war, and thus that the Hitler regime was not reducible to finance capital. Varga was incredulous.¹⁴⁰

In Berlin, Kandelaki’s efforts to jump-start talks for bilateral political rapprochement had gone nowhere, and Stalin, through Litvinov, had tried to shift channels to the German foreign ministry. The Germans had raised questions about the Soviet request for absolute confidentiality; Litvinov, who loathed the idea of talks with Nazi Germany, smelled a rat, suspecting that, because of its economic straits, Germany was trying to simulate talks with Moscow to interest London and Paris in economic negotiations. But German foreign minister Neurath informed Schacht of similar suspicions: “Yesterday, during a personal report to the Führer, I spoke to him about your discussions with Mr. Kandelaki and especially about the declaration he made to you in the name of Stalin and Molotov. . . . I am in agreement with the Führer that at present these [talks] could lead to no result at all, and rather would be used by them to reach their desired goal of a military alliance with France and, if possible, a further rapprochement with England.” He added that any Soviet declaration about reining in Comintern propaganda would be worth nothing, as had been shown by earlier Soviet promises to Britain. The only thing that would move the Führer would be a regime change away from Bolshevism toward military dictatorship in Moscow. “Heil Hitler! Your Neurath.”¹⁴¹

Kandelaki, on his own initiative, approached Herbert Göring, an industrial adviser, SS officer, and cousin of the famous Luftwaffe head, and Herbert expressed delight at Moscow’s willingness to enter direct talks and promised to inform his cousin, as if the same information conveyed by official channels weeks earlier would not have reached Hermann Göring. These talks also went nowhere. “Schacht managed only to whisper to me (literally whisper) that he does not see any possibility right now for altering our relations,” Surits wrote Litvinov. “The young Göring also hinted not a word about our matters.”¹⁴² Stalin sent a ciphered telegram to Berlin (March 19, 1937) asking Kandelaki if he would agree to take over as ambassador to Germany in place of Surits—deemed by the American ambassador to Berlin “the brightest head among the diplomats here”—who was being transferred to Paris.¹⁴³ But on April 2, the Soviets announced that Kandelaki was being recalled from Berlin and promoted to deputy trade commissar.¹⁴⁴

On April 1, 1937, the second Five-Year Plan had been pronounced complete—in just four years and three months, just like the first. (Ten days later, the third Five-Year Plan would be officially approved.) On April 5, Surits left Berlin for consultations in Moscow; on April 7, he was officially transferred to Paris, but he returned to Germany to await his successor. On April 16, he wrote to Litvinov from Berlin: “Without exception, all the members of the diplomatic corps are fixed on the question of possible changes in Soviet-German relations. The rumors about the possibility of a rapprochement between Germany and the USSR have become widespread in Berlin’s diplomatic circles, despite being refuted. Some even suggested that the relevant negotiations have already begun, which the Soviet side is keeping in strict confidence.”¹⁴⁵ Litvinov’s suspicions had been correct. Germany leaked the “negotiations,” trying to drive a wedge between the USSR and France. On April 17, Litvinov telegrammed the Soviet chargé in Paris (Yevgeny Hirschfeld) and the envoy in Czechoslovakia (Alexandrovsky): “Inform the foreign ministry that the rumors circulating abroad about our rapprochement with Germany are without foundation. We did not conduct and are not conducting negotiations with the Germans, which should be clear if only from the simultaneous recall of our ambassador and trade representative.”¹⁴⁶

Hitler had unilaterally terminated the back-channel contacts with Soviet personnel. Stalin had the German nationals in the Soviet Union who had been arrested deported.¹⁴⁷ Also in April, on his initiative, the politburo formed two parallel quintets, which were dubbed permanent commissions: one for foreign policy and other top-secret matters (Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Yezhov) and one for urgent economic affairs (Molotov, Stalin, Chubar, Mikoyan, Kaganovich).¹⁴⁸ This institutionalized the narrower decision making in the name of the politburo that was already prevalent.

A DESPOT’S REALM

Terror had seized the privileged precincts of society—the postmidnight knock, the search and confiscations in the presence of summoned neighbors (“witnesses” were required by law), the wailing of spouses and children, the disappearances without trace, the fruitless pleading for information at NKVD reception windows, the desperate queues outside transit prisons and unheard screams inside, the bribes to guards for scraps of information on whereabouts.¹⁴⁹ But ordinary Soviet inhabitants mostly did not feel an immediate threat of arrest.¹⁵⁰ As the morbid joke had it, when uniformed men arrived and said “NKVD,” people answered, “You’ve got the wrong apartment—the Communists live upstairs.”¹⁵¹ Newspaper editorials complained that collective farmers were illegally enlarging household plots, reducing compulsory deliveries, and avoiding tax payments after the arrests of all their supervisors.¹⁵² Pravda criticized workers, too, for supposedly taking advantage of the destruction of enemies by failing to show up on the job.¹⁵³ One provincial factory worker, the landlord to the exiled poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife, told the poet that the trials were an elite affair, “a fight for power among themselves.”¹⁵⁴

Soviet life proceeded on its course. Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov published their entertaining One-Story America, about their travels to that far-off land, and the Bolshoi premiered Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (April 14, 1937). A week later the Moscow Art Theater premiered Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in a staging by Nemirovich-Danchenko. Stalin attended, along with Molotov, Voroshilov, and Zhdanov. It depicted how the passionate love of Anna (played by Alla Tarasova) for Vronsky led to her suicide. The show concluded with a life-size train bearing down on the audience as Anna lay on the tracks.¹⁵⁵ Earlier that same day, Stalin had Yezhov invent the “discovery,” via intelligence sources, of a foreign plot against Tukhachevsky’s life, which prevented the marshal from accepting an invitation to the upcoming coronation in London of George VI. The Soviets announced that Tukhachevsky had a cold.¹⁵⁶

On April 22, Stalin paid his third visit to a part of the eighty-mile canal linking the Moscow and Volga rivers; newsreels and newspapers showered the visit with publicity (several of the people captured on film would soon be arrested and erased).¹⁵⁷ For the canal’s official opening, in summer, a flotilla of forty-four ships would deliver the supposed builder-Stakhanovites to the embankment at Moscow’s Gorky Park, where a celebration took place.¹⁵⁸ The canal was built by Gulag laborers, more than 20,000 of whom likely perished. Agitators celebrated the achievement that Moscow was now linked to five seas: White, Black, Baltic, Caspian, and Azov.

Food hardships returned. Around 100 million rural folk, 97 percent of all rural households, were confined to 237,000 collective farms and compelled to supply the fruits of their labor—grain, meat, milk, eggs—to the state at prices that were more than ten times below those at “peasant” markets. At the same time, more than 38 percent of the country’s vegetables and potatoes and 68 percent of its meat and dairy products in 1937 were produced on their small household plots for sale at those markets.¹⁵⁹ The state store network had grown considerably, but it still had fewer outlets and was more poorly managed than NEP-era retail.¹⁶⁰ Urban per capita consumption in 1937 was higher than it had been in 1928.¹⁶¹ But the priority on heavy industry and the military depressed living standards.¹⁶² Decent housing was especially scarce.¹⁶³ The effects of the poor 1936 harvest were being felt. Local newspapers referred to the queues for bread, indirectly acknowledging the shortages. Secret NKVD reports in 1937 noted “food difficulties”—collective farmers fleeing the most affected areas for the cities to try to get the food they had grown that had been confiscated from them, and spreading typhus.¹⁶⁴ Vyshinsky, the USSR procurator general, reported to Stalin in spring 1937 about peasants stealing the corpses of collapsed livestock, eating offal, potato roots, and fellow humans.¹⁶⁵

The first Soviet rockets using liquid fuel were launched, traveling eight miles.¹⁶⁶ At the same time, in heavy industry and the defense industry, 585 people had been arrested. There were also arrests in the enlightenment commissariat (288), light industry (141), transport (137), agricultural commissariat (102), food commissariat (100), and the Academy of Sciences (77).¹⁶⁷ The forestry commissariat had, instead of the budgeted 2,480 personnel, just 1,024.¹⁶⁸ Meanwhile, provincial and republic NKVD “party actives” were being forced to follow the suicidal ritual of mutual denunciation. Stalin read an anonymous letter sent to him that claimed that many operatives in the NKVD feared arrest and could not comprehend how the entire NKVD leadership had consisted of thieves and traitors, imploring Stalin to check into the situation and stop the extermination of people.¹⁶⁹

HINTS

Semyon Krivoshein, the tank commander in Spain, had written to Voroshilov urging that the Spanish Communists be allowed to seize power, in order to prosecute the war effectively. “Revolutionary Spain needs a strong government that is able to organize and guarantee the victory of the revolution,” he stressed. “The Communist party ought to come to power even by force, if necessary.” Voroshilov had passed Krivoshein’s report to Stalin on March 10, 1937.¹⁷⁰ But on March 14, in the Little Corner, Stalin met with Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Dimitrov, André Marty, and Togliatti and again expressed support for the Socialist trade unionist Largo Caballero as prime minister. The despot did agree it was best to have Largo Caballero relinquish the war minister portfolio.¹⁷¹ Voroshilov wrote to Berzin and Gaikis on March 15, that, to overcome the tensions between the Spanish Socialists and Communists, Moscow would not object to a merger of the two in a united Socialist Workers’ Party. The next day, Voroshilov instructed Berzin and Stern that the Pravda journalist Koltsov was to refrain from mocking Mussolini, so as not to provoke expanded Italian involvement in the war.¹⁷² Dimitrov, for his part, had been imploring Stalin for another meeting before Marty left Moscow for Spain on March 16, and, that day, the Comintern chief, Togliatti, and Marty were received, along with the cronies, at the Near Dacha, “until 2:30 in the morning.” Stalin cracked wise at Dimitrov’s expense, unnerving him. The despot would not budge on the matter of Communist revolution in Spain.¹⁷³

A Communist takeover had become entirely realistic. By spring 1937, Spain’s Communist party—long one of Europe’s smallest—reached 250,000 members, on its way to perhaps 400,000.¹⁷⁴ (French Communist party membership peaked at 330,000 in 1937; the British Communist party numbered fewer than 20,000.) Spain’s Communists, moreover, were a fighting force: perhaps 130,000 of the 360,000 troops in the Republic’s People’s Army were Communists.¹⁷⁵ The entire POUM may have been 60,000 members, the anarchist groups 100,000, and the Socialist party 160,000. Civil war had made the Communists Republic Spain’s dominant force. Indeed, Largo Caballero, a courageous if vain man, regretted this ever-growing influence of the Spanish Communists and of Moscow, and during the early-winter months of 1937 and into the spring, he floated versions of a war settlement through the Spanish ambassador in Paris. France would obtain the part of Morocco it did not control, Germany would be offered mines and other economic concessions, and Italy a naval base on Menorca, while the Soviets would be forced out.¹⁷⁶ Stalin would likely have known of such a proposal. He told Dimitrov that “if there is a decision for foreign forces to leave Spain, the International Brigades are to be disbanded.”¹⁷⁷

Stalin was reading his briefs closely, writing to Voroshilov (April 13, 1937) that Berzin, in Spain, “is mistaken in his assessment of the failed offensive of the blues [Republic forces] in the area of Casa de Campo [west of Madrid]. The cause of the failure above all consists in the circumstance that when the blues attacked Casa de Campo, the blue troops at Jarama [east of Madrid] remained silent, not even undertaking demonstration acts and giving the whites [Nationalists] the opportunity to throw in their reserves from Jarama against the blues in Casa de Campo. The blue troops are making analogous tactical mistakes constantly.”¹⁷⁸ Right or wrong, it was a battlefield analysis not reliant on invocations of treason and conspiracy.

Franco had felt constrained to abandon, for now, the attempt to capture Madrid, but forces under Mola were being massed to conquer Spain’s Basque country. On April 26, 1937, the German Condor Legion, assisted by Italian aircraft, attacked Guernica, the ancient capital of the Basques, at the behest of the Nationalists, aiming to sow terror in the Republic’s rear. The attack came on a Monday, market day. Not only was the civilian population of some 5,000 to 7,000 (including refugees) carpet-bombed, but as they tried to escape, they were strafed with machine guns mounted on Heinkel He-51s. Hundreds were killed. George Steer, a British journalist in the vicinity, stirred worldwide anger over the atrocities and German culpability with firsthand reportage (Times, April 28, 1937), which was reprinted in France. Nationalists muddied the waters, introducing the lie, propagated by British friends of Franco, that the Basques had blown up their own symbolic capital to discredit Nationalist forces.¹⁷⁹

Also in April 1937, the NKVD intercepted and photographed a communication from the Japanese military attaché in Warsaw to the general staff in Tokyo. NKVD foreign intelligence could not read the Japanese and had to go to Lefortovo prison for assistance from R. N. Kim, a Soviet counterintelligence agent on Japan who had been arrested as a foreign spy. The document was composed in the hand of the Japanese attaché’s aide—handwriting well known to Kim—and conveyed that “contact had been established with an emissary of Marshal Tukhachevsky.” This secret message for Tokyo had been sent not by ciphered telegram but by diplomatic pouch, which traveled from Poland to Japan through the Soviet Union. Japanese intelligence appears to have intended the “secret” document to be “intercepted.”¹⁸⁰

MAY DAYS

A convoluted action also took place on May Day 1937, a holiday marked by a military parade through the seat of power. “Infantry, cavalry, tanks would sweep past while fighters and bombers roared overhead,” one foreign observer noted. “Every now and then he [Stalin] would raise his hand, palm outstretched, with a little gesture that was at once a friendly wave, a benediction, and a salute.”¹⁸¹ Still, the regime undertook unprecedented precautions, even by Stalinist standards, enveloping Red Square in NKVD troops and plainclothes officers—as if a putsch were imminent. It was: Stalin’s putsch. Right after the parade, in the normally convivial setting of the Voroshilovs’ apartment, the despot warned the many military men present that unexposed enemies were in their midst.¹⁸²

In Catalonia by this time, tensions were boiling over, because food prices had nearly doubled since the onset of civil war, many factories were operating far below capacity, and tit-for-tat political murders were taking place. The governing Socialists, not to mention the Communists, had long been eager to crush the anarchists, as well as the POUM and, along with them, Catalan regional autonomy. On May 2, when the civilian president of the Republic’s government called the civilian president of the Catalan Generalitat, an operator at the anarchist-controlled main telephone station said the line needed to be kept open for more important business. The next day, government police seized the station. Workers in Barcelona laid down their tools, barricades went up, and, within hours, all political forces had mustered their militias. Later, Franco would boast that his agents had provoked the Barcelona anarchist uprising so as to disorganize the Republic’s rear. No doubt his agents did try. The NKVD, too, had infiltrated the POUM to instigate an attempted “seizure of power”—as a pretext to crush it.¹⁸³ In fact, no one needed to instigate the events. The crackdown was brutal. On May 7, a special assault guard arrived from Valencia, some 6,000 men. The street combat left around 500 dead and 1,000 wounded.¹⁸⁴ On May 15, amid calls for harsh reprisals against “anarchist” violence, Largo Caballero resigned as prime minister.

During Barcelona’s violent May Days, Koltsov was on a six-week trip back home. He had dug in with soldiers in trenches, witnessing the heroism and death of a real war. “There was something new in him, he became older, more severe, appeared pensive,” one acquaintance recalled. “He had gotten thinner, his skin was tanned, the flame of war had literally burned him, charred him.”¹⁸⁵ Koltsov’s longtime coworkers at Pravda were being accused of monstrous crimes and being arrested. Around his luxury apartment at Government House (the House on the Embankment), the doors to his neighbors’ apartments were sealed with wax, indicating that the residents had been hauled off by the NKVD.¹⁸⁶

Stalin, joined by Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and Yezhov, had granted Koltsov an audience in the Little Corner, his second. “He sincerely, profoundly, . . . fanatically believed in the wisdom of Stalin,” Koltsov’s brother Boris Yefimov would recall. “How many times, after meeting the Master, my brother would regale me in minute detail about his way of conversing, about his specific observations, phrases, jokes. He liked everything about Stalin.”¹⁸⁷ Now the despot mocked Koltsov. “Stalin stood near me, put his hand on his heart, and bowed: ‘What should one call you in Spanish, Mig-u-el?’” Koltsov told his brother after the audience. “Mig-el, Comrade Stalin.” Stalin: “Right, then, Don Mig-el. We, noble Spaniards, heartily thank you for your interesting report. Goodbye for now, Don Mig-el.” As Koltsov reached the door, Stalin called after him: “Have you a revolver, Comrade Koltsov?” “Yes, Comrade Stalin.” “But you aren’t planning to shoot yourself with it?” “Of course not.” “Well, excellent! Excellent! Thank you again, Comrade Koltsov, goodbye, Don Mig-el.”¹⁸⁸

After Moscow’s May Day, the Pravda correspondent made his way back to Spain. A new NKVD courier for the diplomatic pouch arrived from Moscow and casually told fellow operatives in Spain that Koltsov “had sold himself to the English.”¹⁸⁹

ASSASSINATIONS