CHAPTER 6 ON A BLUFF
The cause of Spain is not solely the cause of the Spaniards, but the cause of all progressive and advanced humanity.
STALIN, open telegram to José Díaz, published in Pravda, October 16, 1936, republished in Mundo Obrero, October 17
Stalin conducts a struggle on a totally different plane. He seeks to strike not at the ideas of an opponent, but at his skull.
TROTSKY, journal entry en route to Mexico on a Norwegian oil tanker, December 30, 1936 1
STALIN DEPARTED FOR SOCHI ON AUGUST 14, 1936, and would remain down south through October 25. His absences from Moscow since 1930 (this holiday included) averaged seventy-eight days per annum. His Sochi dacha was not in the town proper, but on a zigzagging road about a mile up and in from the Black Sea. North led to Sochi, south to the sulfur baths of Matsesta (farther on were Gagra and Sukhum, in Abkhazia). The pristine setting offered the smell of pine trees and salty air, while the compound contained guest villas, tennis courts (where Nadya used to play), and a detached billiards hall, all surrounded by NKVD troops. The main dacha was an unpretentious wooden structure with an open-air veranda that Stalin prized. Matsesta’s curative sulfur waters were now being pumped in, obviating the trip. The staff and guards equipped the residence with the usual pianolas and phonographs, but holidays were not downtime. While away from the capital in 1930, Stalin had remade the Soviet government structure, and the next year he reorganized management of foreign affairs. The 1936 southern holiday would prove to be his most momentous yet as he further radicalized his pursuit of Trotskyites with his most frenzied public trial to date and upended international politics with a military intervention on the Iberian Peninsula.
Spain had been Europe’s only major country to avoid the Great War, and the Second Spanish Republic, born in April 1931, bucked the authoritarian trend engulfing the continent. That year, amid a resounding Radical Republican Party victory in municipal elections, King Alfonso XIII, who had reigned since his birth, in 1886, fled abroad (without formal abdication), inspiring hopes among the country’s peasants and workers and fears among the propertied and the Church establishment. But the Republic had managed only timid land reform, while Spain’s few pockets of industry remained gripped by the Depression. A third of the population could neither read nor write, and more than half of its children had no access to education. The Cortes, Spain’s parliament, was roiled by raw, irreconcilable emotions—for and against the Church and the army, for and against socialism. A military coup in August 1932 had been foiled by a general strike, but it confirmed the army’s lack of loyalty to the Republic. Spain experienced wild electoral swings from left (1931) to right (1933) and back on February 18, 1936, when a leftist coalition known as the Popular Front defeated the ruling coalition of rightist parties (the National Front). A quirk in the election law magnified the Popular Front’s narrow victory and gave them a solid majority of 264 representatives—162 Left Republicans and independents, 88 Socialists, 14 Communists—versus 156 for the right and 54 for the center (including many Catalans and the Basques).2 The Popular Front’s majority, moreover, stemmed from working-class parties, but the Socialists, Communists, and anarchists did not take government portfolios. At the same time, the Basques in the north and the Catalans in the northeast strove for autonomy, while the central government possessed no reliable provincial officialdom and was hard pressed to live up to soaring expectations for social reform. Some electoral fraud on behalf of the Popular Front also contributed to the instability. More vivid were sensational fables of “Red massacres” of clergy and landowners, mob actions, and rural unrest. The upshot was a cauldron of antigovernment conspiracies.3
Spain would be torn apart by a civil war during which the country of 25 million people would see 1.7 million fighters conscripted by the Republic and 1.2 million by the Nationalists, and up to 200,000 battlefield deaths, over the course of nearly three years of combat over class, religion, region, and governance. Perhaps as many as 49,000 civilians would perish in the Republic’s zone, where the leftists would perpetrate or indulge mob killings of “reactionaries” and “fascists.” How many civilians died in the Nationalists’ bombing of Republic-controlled cities remains unknown (perhaps 10,000), but the Nationalists would end up summarily executing some 130,000 people in a deliberate strategy of anticivilian terror.4 During the same period, Stalin would execute or cause the death of up to 1 million people, from a total population of close to 170 million. But the conspiracies in the Soviet Union were invented.
Some scholars have argued that events in Spain helped precipitate or at least radicalize Stalin’s domestic terror of 1936–38, which they portray as a sincere, if wildly excessive, attempt to eradicate suspected real and potential saboteurs lying in wait to assist externally launched aggression.5 But Stalin had decided in 1935 to reopen the Kirov murder case and instigate a new wave of arrests of “Trotskyites” around the country. On June 29, 1936—before any hint of Spain—Yagoda had reported to Stalin, Molotov, and Yezhov on “very important” interrogation testimony obtained from arrested “Trotskyites”: Yefim Dreitser, Trotsky’s former bodyguard; Richard Pikel, former head of Zinoviev’s secretariat; and Isaac Esterman. Stalin circulated the report to the politburo.6 Furious preparations were under way for a showcase trial (pokazatelnyi protess) involving these and other “Trotskyites” in Moscow. Spain would turn out to be important for Stalin’s mass bloodletting less as cause than as added rationalization.7
In the summer and early fall of 1936, the Soviet leader made no speeches; indeed, he did not even appear in public. He sat on his Sochi veranda, reading stacks of well-ordered secret documents, then dictated some telegrams to aides with him on the Black Sea coast, which technicians coded and relayed to Kaganovich in Moscow. Kaganovich, who had never finished elementary school and could not write grammatical Russian, in turn formulated Stalin’s instructions as politburo decrees, which he had coded and dispatched to the tens of thousands of party committees that existed in every single Soviet locality and factory, and a majority of collective and state farms. Comintern secretary general Dimitrov did the same for every Communist party in the world. This produced orchestrated mass meetings all across Eurasia and beyond, at which preselected speakers issued demands for execution, even before convictions had been pronounced, while others in attendance raised their hands in agreement. The Soviet press, in ideological lockstep, delivered saturation coverage to thousands of towns and tens of thousands of villages, whipping up intense hysteria. The power of Stalin’s regime—resting upon the telegraph, a tiny handful of aides, the Communist party machine, the secret police, the military, and the dream of a better world—was breathtaking.
While atop his bluff overlooking the Black Sea, 850 miles from Moscow, Stalin would also decide after much hesitation to intervene in the Spanish civil war.8 He ordered no strategic analyses of the pros and cons or formal policy-making discussions.9 He seems to have consulted next to no one. Molotov, head of the government, was himself on holiday (July 27–September 1, 1936). Mikoyan was in the United States (August–September) to study the food industry, with more than $600,000 in hard currency to acquire model machinery.10 When the intervention details were finalized, Orjonikidze, head of heavy industry, was on holiday (September 5–November 5).11 To be sure, Kaganovich was in Moscow, and in frequent contact with Sochi (referring to Stalin as “our parent”). Voroshilov was also in the capital and communicated with Stalin on the high-frequency phone and by ciphered telegram. But the decision to take action in Spain, like the earlier reopening of the Kirov case and preparations for a grand trial of Trotskyites, was Stalin’s alone. We shall puzzle it out, including limits he imposed.12 Soviet military hardware sent to Spain would be voluminous and state of the art, but Soviet personnel would never exceed 700 or so at any time, two thirds of them in lower-level positions: pilots, tank drivers, technicians. It was not Spain but Trotsky that riveted Stalin’s attention, including much of the attention he paid to Spain.
Never an optimist about revolution abroad, Stalin had nonetheless said that the critical ingredient was war, which Spain would have, making it a test of his own theory of geopolitics. The question of revolution in Spain also intensified his rivalry with his long-standing nemesis. Not long after King Alfonso’s flight, Trotsky had written an unsolicited letter (April 27, 1931) to the Soviet politburo advising that the fate of “the revolution” in Spain depended on whether a combat-capable and authoritative Communist party was formed there. He had also warned that worker-peasant defeat “would lead almost automatically to the establishment in Spain of a genuine fascism in the style of Mussolini.” Stalin had distributed the letter to the inner circle, writing on it, “I think this impudent and Menshevik charlatan citizen Trotsky should get a blow to the head from the Comintern executive committee. Let him know his place.”13
COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Britain had acceded to French ambitions in Morocco in 1904, provided that weaker Spain retained control over the Moroccan territory directly opposite British-controlled Gibraltar, which was crucial to Britain’s dominant position in the Mediterranean. Francisco Franco y Bahamonde had arrived in Spanish Morocco in 1912 and cofounded a Spanish Legion there. (His counterpart, the French commander in North Africa, was Philippe Pétain.) A provincial like Stalin and Hitler, Franco had grown up in Spanish Galicia, where he was marinated in peasant pragmatism and bullied by his father. He was short in stature at five feet five inches (1.64 meters)—two inches shorter than Stalin and three than Hitler—and very slight, earning the nickname Cerillito (“Little Matchstick”). At age fourteen, unable to enroll at the Naval Academy, Franco had entered an infantry academy, where, in 1910, he graduated 251st in a class of 312. In quick succession, however, he would become Spain’s youngest captain, major, colonel, and general (the first in his graduating class), thanks to his exploits in colonial Morocco. In 1916, Franco took a bullet to the lower abdomen—a fraction of an inch in any direction and, like most soldiers with stomach wounds in Africa, he would have died. But after ten years of ruthless counterinsurgency, he secured the Moroccan ruler’s surrender, the deed that earned him a general’s rank at thirty-three, which made him the youngest general ever in the Spanish army and at the time the youngest in Europe. “My years in Africa live within me with indescribable force,” he would later tell a newspaper editor. “There was born the possibility of rescuing a Great Spain.”14
The man who would make Spain great again was a poor public speaker, with a high-pitched voice. In Morocco, he had come to detest the leftists back in Spain who, in his mind, failed to appreciate the grand colonial enterprise.15 In 1935, Franco was promoted to chief of staff in Madrid, and in February 1936, when elections brought to power the Popular Front, the general told a confidant it was a Trojan horse to smuggle Communism into Spain and offered his assistance to the defeated rightist prime minister, should the latter want to annul the vote.16 The Republic’s civilian president smelled a rat and reassigned Franco to the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast. In fact, Spain’s military was engaged in a plot. But Franco’s participation was not confirmed until the very eve of their putsch, and even then he voiced uncertainty. The prime mover in the coup was the Cuban-born general Emilio Mola. (Cuba had been a province of Spain.) The forty-eight-year-old Mola had recently been reassigned to a backwater with a small garrison to counteract his suspected plotting. His main accomplice was the sixty-four-year-old general José Sanjurjo, who, along with some 15,000 Spaniards (mostly monarchists and conservatives), was living under asylum in Portugal, courtesy of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship. Salazar ignored the Spanish Republic’s pleas to prevent Sanjurjo’s return, but on July 20, the latter’s small plane crashed en route: it seems the general’s clothes trunk was too heavy.17 Sanjurjo’s unexpected death elevated the forty-three-year-old Franco as Mola’s main partner and rival. “Franco,” Sanjurjo had warned, still bitter that during his 1932 coup the younger man had stood on the sidelines, “will do nothing to commit himself; he will always be in the shadows, because he is crafty [cuco].”18
Franco had flown from the Grand Canary—on a chartered British plane—to Morocco, where he rallied Spain’s best fighting force, the ruthless Army of Africa (5,000 men of the Spanish Foreign Legion, 17,000 Moorish troops, and 17,000 Spanish conscripts).19 On July 17, they rose up in the coordinated coup. But on the mainland, the Nationalists gained the support of only about half of the Territorial Army, some 60,000 soldiers. Garrisons in key industrial cities—Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao—refused to join the rebellion. But the military plotters would not accept defeat. Mola became the rebel Nationalist commander in the north, Franco in the south. Colonial experience could cut in very different ways: Gandhi had gone to South Africa and returned to British India with the idea of a Congress Party and peaceful protest; Franco, from Spanish Morocco, brought back brutal counterinsurgency. He and Mola enacted the savage political cleansing (limpieza) of Franco’s Moroccan colonial war—only this time against fellow Spaniards.20 To induce Republic-held territory to surrender, Nationalist troops engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Women in the tens of thousands had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves. Men were just shot, especially if found in possession of a trade union card. All the while, Franco obsessed over supposed international conspiracies of Freemasons, Jews, Communists.
Spain had last experienced major armed conflict when resisting Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Catalonia used the military’s putsch to carry out its own regional coup d’état against rule by Madrid, splitting the resistance. In Barcelona, in what was christened the Catalan Generalitat, a newly formed Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia competed with anarchists to arm workers in resistance, while the Republic government in Madrid reluctantly armed workers. These new militias radicalized domestic politics—the very outcome that the military putsch was supposed to forestall. Worker syndicates seized factories, and farmers formed collectives or redistributed land to individuals.21 In the greatest twist, despite the weakness of Spain’s right-wing party, inspired by fascism, the Falange (Phalanx), and its Communist party—each possessed fewer than 30,000 members in July 1936—Spain became a battleground in the international struggle between fascism and Communism.22
GREAT POWER MACHINATIONS
Spain and the Soviet Union were remote from each other (the USSR accounted for 0.9 percent of Spain’s trade in the first half of 1936).23 The Spanish Republic maintained normal diplomatic relations with just about every country in the world except the Soviet Union, and the putsch had looked unlikely to alter any of that.24 France ought to have been Spain’s natural partner, especially after the June 1936 formation of a Popular Front government in Paris, which included Communists as well as Socialists under Prime Minister Léon Blum. Spain’s Popular Front government had already appealed to France’s Popular Front for military aid by July 18, and got a positive initial response from Blum, but pro-Franco personnel in Spain’s embassy in Paris leaked the request to France’s right-wing press, which launched a vicious campaign against Blum (a Jew as well as a Socialist). On a visit to London, moreover, Blum discovered that Britain opposed helping Spain’s elected government.25 Britain had a great deal at stake: it accounted for 40 percent of total foreign investment in Spain, including the Rio Tinto mining conglomerate. But Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought to avoid new government commitments, given the costs of maintaining the empire, or unwittingly facilitating a Communist takeover in Spain.26 His stance was shared by even most of the Labour party and the trade union bosses.27 Many British Catholics, meanwhile, admired General Franco’s stated program; much of British business sided with him as well. And so, on July 25, Blum reversed himself and agreed to join Britain’s policy of “non-intervention.” The hope was that the gambit would also take in Germany and Italy.28
The Spanish putschists, however, themselves had appealed to Hitler and Mussolini. Franco, bereft of an air force, was cut off from the mainland, but his appeal to the German government failed. He had recourse to a second channel: German expatriates in Spanish Morocco. A nondescript German sales director at a trading firm (kitchen equipment) who was a member of the Nazi Party Abroad wanted to demonstrate his own importance and that of the fledgling organization, and he flew Franco’s emissaries to Berlin, using Nazi party channels to reach Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess on holiday at his country estate. On July 25, Hess, one of the few people to address Hitler with the familiar du, received the emissaries and phoned Hitler, who was at the summer Wagner Festival. Hess dispatched the Spaniards and Morocco-based Nazis by car to Bayreuth, and, following the conclusion of Siegfried, the group hand-delivered Franco’s request for military aid at the Wagner family residence. Hitler had shown no interest in supporting the coup before the generals had acted, and now seemed unsure—his own rearmament had a ways to go—but he launched a monologue and worked himself into a lather. (“If Spain really goes Communist, France in her present situation will also be Bolshevized in due course, and then Germany is finished.”) That very day, support for Franco against the “international Jewish revolutionary headquarters in Moscow” was assured.29 Hitler consulted only the minions in his company and made the decision against their objections.30 “We’re taking part a bit in Spain,” Goebbels noted in his diary. “Not clear. Who knows what it’s good for.”31
Hitler appears to have been in a fine mood that evening: the aid to Spain would be dubbed Operation Magic Fire. (“Magic fire” music accompanies Siegfried’s passage through the flames to liberate Brünnhilde.) The Führer even sent twice as many Junkers Ju 52 transport planes as Franco requested. Franco would have eventually gotten his troops over the Spanish Republic’s naval blockade to the mainland, but Nazi assistance accelerated that movement, struck at the Republic’s morale, and buttressed Franco’s standing vis-à-vis Mola. Franco had also approached Italy for support, on July 22, 1936, and the new Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law), was gung-ho. The duce had mocked the Spanish Republic as “not a revolution but a plagiarism,” and had been paying a small retainer to a leader of Spain’s fascist equivalents while vaguely promising support to any would-be putschists.32 Now, emboldened by reports of British acquiescence and French paralysis, he decided to provide substantial military assistance, without consulting his own military men. In parallel to his expansionism in Abyssinia, the duce dreamed of a still larger Italian Mediterranean empire at French expense, via a friendly government in Spain. He also derided Léon Blum as “one Jew who did not enjoy the gift of prophecy.”33 Spain would push Italy still closer to Germany.
Spain would also push France and the Soviet Union further apart. The French brass feared that any military support for the Spanish Popular Front could ignite a pan-European war, which, overestimating the German military, they felt France was in no position to fight successfully.34 More broadly, French ruling circles viewed reliance on the Soviets to stand up to Nazi Germany as a provocation toward Berlin and an invitation to ideological contagion. “If defeated,” the French foreign minister would note privately, France “would be Nazified. If victorious, it must, owing to the destruction of German power, submit, with the rest of Europe, to the overwhelming weight of the Slavic world, armed with the Communist flamethrower.”35
FABRICATING A “UNITED” CENTER
Yagoda’s NKVD was rounding up “Trotskyites,” including in faraway Gulag camps. On June 19, 1936—again, well before the putsch in Spain—he and Vyshinsky had sent Stalin a list of eighty-two people accused of terrorism “links,” recommending that they be tried by the military collegium and executed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were included. Stalin instructed Yezhov to have the NKVD prepare a trial against a united Trotskyite-Zinovievite “center.”36 On July 15, Yagoda sent a secret NKVD circular to every operative, severely criticizing the NKVD bosses in certain regions for “opportunistic kindheartedness, self-assurance, forgetfulness of old Chekist traditions, and inactivity” (i.e., failure to expose “Trotskyites”).37 Stalin was insisting on a high-profile public trial, broadcast live, and Yezhov applied pressure so that people under arrest began to be re-interrogated to build a story line of a “united center.” Zinoviev, naïvely, had been writing groveling prison letters to Stalin asking for forgiveness; Kamenev had been trying to dissociate himself from Zinoviev.38 In mid-July, the two were brought from prisons in the Urals to Moscow. Yezhov took part in their interrogations and appealed to their revolutionary patriotism, arguing that an international Trotskyite conspiracy in cahoots with Germany and Japan threatened the Soviet Union, and thus their confessions were necessary for the cause.
Zinoviev offered to comply if Stalin personally promised to spare him. Kamenev resisted (“You are observing Thermidor in pure form,” he said during interrogation). The two were taken to see “the politburo,” which turned out to be a meeting with Stalin and Voroshilov.39 Stalin evidently flattered them, calling them comrades, followers of Lenin, whose cooperation was necessary to combat Trotsky.40 No less germane was the fact that Kamenev had been informed that his son was under investigation. Kamenev and Zinoviev did begin to testify about their improbable plotting with Trotsky.41 On July 23, 1936, Yakov Agranov, who, together with Yezhov, had handled the original Kirov investigation case against the “Zinovievites,” personally re-interrogated the already imprisoned Dreitser (said to be the “head” of an underground “Trotskyite” organization) and Pikel, extracting the necessary “testimony” concerning a “united center.”42 On July 26, Stalin had the NKVD haul in Sokolnikov, who had once joined Zinoviev and Kamenev in questioning Stalin’s absolute power in the role of general secretary. On the night of July 27–28, the NKVD arrested the ex-wife of Yuri Pyatakov, Orjonikidze’s first deputy at heavy industry. Stalin’s anti-Trotsky drive had its own dynamic prior to events in Spain.
TRYING TO STEM REVOLUTION
Bereft of an ambassador in Madrid, Stalin had next to no information about what was going on, beyond reports via Comintern channels.43 On July 23, 1936, at a Comintern executive committee meeting, Dimitrov emphasized the value of the Spanish conflict for rallying international forces to a global popular front, and begged Stalin for comments on draft theses.44 Stalin wrote “correct” on Dimitrov’s instructions to the Spanish Communist party for restraint; on July 24, the secret orders went to Madrid for Spanish Communists “not to run ahead,” that is, to contain their struggle to supporting the “bourgeois democratic republic” rather than pushing for a dictatorship of the proletariat. Dimitrov did allow that “when our positions have strengthened, we can go further.”45 By July 25 the Nazis and Italian fascists were already wielding the bogeyman of “Bolshevism” in Spain to justify supporting the putschists. That day, with Blum backing off his pledge to support Spain’s Republic, the Spanish prime minister, in a letter to the Soviet envoy in Paris, conveyed his government’s desire to purchase Soviet arms in quantity.46 The Soviets did not reply. An Italian assessment out of Moscow on July 27 noted Soviet “embarrassment” over Spain and a likely pursuit of “prudent neutrality.”47
Dimitrov was not received by Stalin during these days. Litvinov, who had recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday and received the Order of Lenin, was urging Stalin to maintain Soviet-French-Anglo “solidarity” by avoiding military aid to Spain’s besieged Republic. The foreign affairs commissar finally got in to see the dictator on July 28 (Molotov and Voroshilov were absent). (Not until August 7 would Stalin again summon anyone to the Kremlin office.)48 The antifascist popular front strategy (Dimitrov) and “collective security” (Litvinov), once seen as in sync, were deeply at odds, given France’s position.
The Comintern executive committee was also discussing China—it aimed to rein in the Chinese Communists, who were not following the Comintern policy of cooperation with Chiang against the Japanese.49 At the end of the Long March, Mao had arrived in Yan’an, in China’s northwest, where the Communists set up a ministate. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist (Guomindang) government, based in Nanking, wanted to isolate the Reds, a task he assigned to Zhang Xueliang, whom the Japanese had chased from Manchuria. Zhang had his headquarters in Xi’an, 200 miles north of Mao, and commanded a sprawling force of perhaps 300,000.Only in late June or early July 1936, after an almost two-year hiatus, was a radio link reestablished between Moscow and the Chinese Communists in the remote interior, and the Chinese comrades asked the Comintern to provide $3 million monthly to cover military expenses, help organize contributions from the Chinese diaspora, and send Soviet aircraft, artillery, antiaircraft artillery, infantry rifles, machine guns, and pontoons, through either Xinjiang or Mongolia.50 But at the July 23 Comintern meeting, Dimitrov insisted that “the task in China right now consists not in expanding the regions under soviets and the Chinese Red Army, but . . . unification of the vast majority of the Chinese people against the Japanese invaders.” The goal was to “complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution,” although eventually, “in the process of this struggle, the moment will come for the mass organization of the struggle for Soviet power.”51
Four days later, Dimitrov submitted draft directives for the Chinese Communists to Stalin, who would take some time to return them. In the meantime, the Comintern directives to Spain’s Communists to avoid revolution arrived just as the Spanish Republic state began to melt away. Jails were being cracked open, court records ransacked, village rents pronounced null and void, and businesses collectivized. Spain’s moderate Socialists, together with Spain’s Communists, could not contain the workers, peasants, and anarchists in the Republic’s zone, especially in Catalonia, where 70 percent of industry would be collectivized in three heady months. “The first impression: armed workers, rifles on their shoulders, but wearing their civilian clothes,” Franz Borkenau, an Austrian writer who had quit the German Communist party in protest over Stalin’s rule and traveled to Spain, would observe. “And no ‘bourgeoisie’ whatever!”52
To stand by while the leftist Popular Front and popular revolution in Spain went down to “fascist” armed aggression would threaten Moscow’s prestige. Sometime between July 27 and 29, 1936, the head of the Spanish Communist party sent a cipher responding in detail to Comintern questions about “the correlation of forces,” which Dimitrov forwarded immediately to Stalin. “The adversary has the advantage that he has many spies in the government camp,” the Spanish report concluded. “Despite that, if France will deliver the requested aid in the form of airplanes and ammunition, the adversary will be destroyed.”53 Would Stalin step into the breach? A genuine leftist revolution was unfolding in Spain against his instructions, and the Chinese Communists were pressing revolution against orders as well. Rendering this situation still more maddening was the circumstance that he was being visibly outflanked on the left by Trotsky.
THE TROTSKY CHALLENGE
Stalin hated Trotsky with a deep, emotional, blind, wild hate; he also feared him, in a way he feared no one else. Trotsky had long been under nearly total NKVD surveillance, first on an island in Turkey and then in France. The NKVD knew of or had inspired a plan by the anti-Soviet émigré Russian All-Military Union to assassinate him in 1934, but operational amateurism produced nothing beyond recriminations.54 In 1935, Trotsky had accepted an offer of asylum from the new Norwegian Labor Party government, taking up residence with his wife as guests of the journalist, painter, and parliamentarian Konrad Knudsen in Oslo, where the NKVD had few resources.55 But Trotsky’s elder son, Lev Sedov, the nerve center of international Trotskyism (such as it was), had remained in Paris, where the Soviet secret police enjoyed a robust presence. Boris Atanasov, known as Afanasyev (b. 1902), an ethnic Bulgarian assassin and kidnapper who oversaw infiltration of émigré circles in Paris, had been tasked with penetration of Trotsky’s Paris operation.
Afanasyev stumbled upon an unbelievably valuable agent: Mordka “Mark” Zborowski (b. 1908), who had been born in a Jewish family in imperial Russia and, after the revolution, resettled in Poland, where he eventually joined the Polish Communists. After an arrest and short prison sentence, Zborowski fled to Berlin, then to Grenoble, where he attended university, and was recruited into the NKVD in Paris around 1933.56 Zborowski befriended Sedov’s wife, who recommended him for the position of her husband’s secretary. “At present the source meets with the son nearly every day,” Zborowski’s secret police handler reported to Moscow, which responded that “we caution that you do not go too far and thereby destroy all our plans in this machination.”57 The NKVD was able to install listening devices on the telephones in the apartments of Sedov and his collaborators. Zborowski also gained access to secret lists of, and correspondence with, trusted Trotsky loyalists worldwide, on the basis of which the NKVD compiled a card catalog. Zborowski, known to Sedov as Étienne, a fluent Russian speaker in an otherwise French-only milieu, took charge of Sedov’s correspondence and helped edit Trotsky’s Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition. Stalin, therefore, could read not only Trotsky’s mail but also drafts of his essays, sometimes before they were published.58
Knowing what Trotsky would publish did not help counter it, however. Events in Spain afforded him a grand new platform from which to bash Stalin still more—as a counterrevolutionary who failed to support not a theoretical but an actual revolution under direct attack by “fascism.” On July 30, Trotsky, in high dudgeon, wrote that in “curbing the social revolution,” Spain’s Popular Front leaders “compel the workers and peasants to spill ten times as much of their own blood in a civil war. And to crown everything, these gentlemen expect to disarm the workers again after the victory and to force them to respect the sacred laws of private property.”59 By that date, Nazi German planes had not only airlifted Franco’s africanistas to the Spanish mainland, but also begun strafing Madrid. Also on July 30, two of the initial Italian squadron of twelve Savoia-Marchetti medium bombers sent from Sardinia to Morocco to assist the Spanish insurgency had crash-landed in French Algeria, revealing Italian involvement.60 The “fascists” had stolen the initiative. More than that even, with the Spanish Republic state dissolving, someone else could fill the vacuum. Stalin seemed to be facing a possibly victorious Trotskyism in Spain, where Trotsky was popular. The specter of Trotskyites capturing a physical redoubt in a real country would seize Stalin like the proverbial red cape in front of a bull.61
DICTATOR’S DILEMMA
Members of Stalin’s inner circle strove to circumscribe the expanding effects of his reopening of the Kirov murder case. Pravda, back on June 2, 1936, had published a speech by Pavel Postyshev, a candidate member of the politburo and party boss of Kiev province, upbraiding Ukrainian officials for unwarranted repressions; five days later, the newspaper editorialized (“Lessons of the Donbass”) that the coal plan fulfillment failures in Ukraine had resulted not from wrecking but from showy record-breaking labor stunts as well as the wrongful persecution of engineers.62 This was a prominent theme of Orjonikidze’s as well. “What kind of saboteurs?” he defiantly exclaimed at a multiday meeting of the guiding council of the heavy industry commissariat on June 25. “During the 19-year existence of Soviet power, we . . . have graduated more than 100,000 engineers and a similar number of technicians. If all of them, and the old-regime engineers as well, whom we have reeducated, turned out to be saboteurs in 1936, then congratulate yourself with such success. What kind of saboteurs! They are not saboteurs, but good people, our sons, our brothers, our comrades. . . . They will die on the front of Soviet power, if this is required. . . . It is not sabotage—this is nonsense—but incompetence.” Orjonikidze’s spirited defense elicited “rousing and prolonged applause.”63
Orjonikidze worked long hours under phenomenal strain, which strained his weak heart. (One time when he suffered from heart palpitations he lost consciousness in his office, inducing his assistants to summon a doctor from the Kremlin hospital.) He also had just one kidney. Gossips said his wife, Zinaida, had a difficult personality, compounding his problems.64 On June 29, the culmination of the heavy industry gathering, the commissar’s poor health had become visible for all to see. A foreign doctor was brought in to examine him.65 Be that as it may, the key factor in exacerbating his health was his old friend and fellow Georgian, who was mercilessly, relentlessly driving the “saboteur” line. Kaganovich also did not see why manifestly loyal people needed to be arrested and executed. He had been defending top Ukrainian officials from Stalin’s wrath since famine days. But he knew Stalin all too well. In early July 1936, the dictator had sent Kaganovich—then vacationing in Kislovodsk—protocols of the Dreitser and Pikel “interrogations”; he took the unsubtle hint. “Although this was clear even earlier, they have now revealed the true bandit face of those murderers and provocateurs Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev,” he had responded to Stalin on July 6. “The main instigator of this gang is that venal scum Trotsky. It is time to declare him an outlaw and to execute the rest of the lowlifes we have in jail. Regards as ever, Yours, L. Kaganovich.”66
Stalin pressed for wider arrests, using the unique instruments only he commanded: he dispatched a secret circular (July 29, 1936)—drafted by Yezhov and edited by the dictator—to party organizations, which was to be read aloud to all party members and which quoted the “testimony” of the various accused “Trotskyites.” “Confronted with the completely irrefutable successes of socialist construction, they initially hoped our party could not cope with the difficulties,” the circular stated. “But seeing that the party was successfully overcoming difficulties, they wagered on the defeat of Soviet power in a forthcoming war, as a result of which they dreamed of seizing power.” Then, “not seeing any prospects, in despair, they resorted to the last means of struggle—terror.” The circular explained that the “Trotskyites” had colluded in terror with Zinoviev and Kamenev and that, after the imprisonment of the latter, “Trotsky had taken upon himself all direction of terrorist activity in the USSR.” The document exhorted that “the essential mark of every Bolshevik in the current situation should be the ability to recognize and identify enemies of the party no matter how well they are able to disguise themselves.” But who were these hidden enemies?67 How did the circular jibe with other signals conveyed by Postyshev and Orjonikidze in the authoritative Pravda?
NKVD operatives would “unmask” enemies to win raises, medals, and promotions; informants, queried about a “Trotskyite” underground, would become eager to please. Regional party officials, in order to protect themselves and their closest people, targeted as “Trotskyites” lower-level types as well as economic managers—precisely the people Orjonikidze sought to protect.68 But Kaganovich, responsible for rail transport—which had been suffering an inordinate number of accidents, driven by underinvestment and overexploitation—expressly rejected assertions of Trotskyites in his bailiwick. On July 30, 1936, the day after the secret party circular on hidden enemies, he presided over the country’s inaugural all-Union Day of Transport, where, before 25,000 railway employees assembled at the outdoor Green Theater, in Gorky Park, as well as a Union-wide audience listening on radio, he delivered a two-hour oration on the daily loading of 81,214 freight cars, exceeding Stalin’s directive to reach 80,000. “Here the way is not purging and repression,” Kaganovich stated, noting the multitudes of railway workers who had received state awards. “No, for 99 percent of railway employees are honest people, who are committed to their work, who love their motherland.”69 Soviet newspapers prominently published photographs of Kaganovich and Orjonikidze together that summer of 1936.70
Multiple incentives impel dictators to try to convert their rule into despotism. Some lack the necessary means or personal traits to crush close allies. Stalin, of course, possessed both the wherewithal and the personality. But would he break Orjonikidze, Kaganovich, and other members of his innermost circle? Kaganovich was indispensable, still running the linchpin party apparatus in his absence, while Orjonikidze, no less vital, ran the critical heavy industry portfolio. Both of them removed a great burden from the far too burdened Stalin. At the same time, Orjonikidze’s Union-wide fiefdom afforded him a political base second only to the dictator’s. Izvestiya (still edited by Bukharin) did not shy from calling Orjonikidze “the people’s favorite,” the expression in Lenin’s purported Testament for Bukharin.71 In fact, Orjonikidze was more accessible, and in many quarters more genuinely popular, than Stalin. And he enjoyed extremely warm relations with other core members of the ruling group, including defense commissar Voroshilov, as well as Kaganovich.
IMPROVISING A COURSE
Stalin maintained his nonresponse to Madrid’s request for arms, but in the meantime the pressure to do something did not abate. On August 1, 1936—the opening day of the Summer Olympics in Nazi Berlin, not to mention the anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War—Izvestiya published an essay by Radek, which Stalin had approved, characterizing the civil war in Spain as part of a “meticulously” planned global aggression by “European fascists.”72 That same day, Pravda published Spanish reportage under the headline “Fascism Means War; Socialism Means Peace.” August 2 in Moscow brought a temperature of 99 degrees Fahrenheit (37.2 Celsius), the highest in fifty-seven years.73 That day, Boris Pasternak met André Gide at his dacha in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino (where he had just moved in) and helped open the Frenchman’s eyes to Soviet realities; Pasternak also warned his NKVD minder that Gide was preparing a critical work on the USSR.74 The next day, which was not a Soviet holiday, a reported throng of more than 100,000 demonstrators assembled on Red Square. Adorned in summer whites in the suffocating heat, the dense crowd listened to songs and speeches calling for defense of the Spanish Republic. Six tanned sportswomen, holding hands, led chants of “Down with Franco! Down with Franco!” “Our hearts are with those who at this moment are giving up their lives in the mountains and streets of Spain, defending the liberty of their people,” a female worker from the Red Dawn factory declared from the dais. “We say, ‘Remember, you are not alone. We are with you.’”75
Soviet newspapers and radio placed Spain center stage, depicting Republic heroism against fascist aggression, and tying the Soviet Union to this cause.76 Pravda—“Hands off the Spanish people!” . . . “Down with the fascist rebels and their German and Italian inspirers!”—reported that workers had been massed in front of the Winter Palace in Leningrad (100,000) and in Tashkent (100,000), Gorky (60,000), Rostov-on-Don (35,000), Minsk (30,000), Sverdlovsk (20,000), and Tiflis (10,000).77 The Comintern resolved to “immediately undertake a wide campaign of solidarity for the fighters defending the Republic in Spain,” including “collections of medicines, foodstuffs, gold,” and enlistment of medical volunteers and purchases of ambulances.78 The regime also announced “voluntary” deductions from workers’ paychecks for humanitarian assistance to Spain.79 “We see how quickly fascists from different states will unite when the task is the asphyxiation of the working class,” one Soviet autoworker was quoted as stating in Pravda. “Through our relief aid . . . we will show the fascists that no country will be cut off from the workers of the rest of the world. The cause of Spain is our own cause.”80
Would Stalin risk getting embroiled in foreign war? “A number of Soviet officials charged with the conduct of Soviet foreign relations were opposed to sending funds to Spain, since they felt that such action would be used by Italy and Germany to justify the aid given by themselves,” one Soviet official told the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow on August 3, 1936. “These objections were overruled, however, by the Soviet leaders who take the view that if the Soviet Union is to continue to maintain hegemony over the international revolutionary movement, it must not hesitate in periods of crisis to assume the leadership of that movement.”81 Tellingly, however, neither Stalin nor any of the members of the Soviet leadership attended the August 3 Moscow demonstration. Not even Comintern leaders were allowed to appear. The main speech was delivered by the head of the trade unions (Nikolai Shvernik), as if the process of gathering humanitarian aid were a spontaneous expression of worker solidarity.82
All the while, the geopolitical maneuvering was fast and furious. In early August, France approached Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and other countries about a formal collective “Non-Intervention Agreement” for Spain.83 Britain had treated a formal agreement guardedly, but now it decided it could drive a wedge between France and Spain. On August 3, the Italian government promised to study the matter. On August 5, the French chargé d’affaires in Moscow approached the foreign affairs commissariat, reporting that Britain had signed on and that Germany had agreed to do so if the Soviets would. Litvinov was on holiday, and one of his deputies, Krestinsky, advised Stalin, “We cannot either not give an affirmative response or give an evasive response, because then this will be used by the Germans and Italians, who will justify their further support for the insurgents by our refusal.” That evening, Krestinsky was able to reply that the USSR, too, would sign on, provided that not only Italy and Germany but Portugal’s dictatorship did so as well.84 The next day, Italy confirmed its support in principle.
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.
On the afternoon of September 26, Stalin and Voroshilov spoke on the phone to discuss military shipments to Spain; they noted that no Soviet trademarks should be discernible on the tanks.191 Stalin also directed Voroshilov to read out the Sochi phonegram about Yagoda’s dismissal to Yagoda at a Council of People’s Commissars meeting. The commander of the Moscow military district and other officers accompanied Yagoda to Lubyanka to turn over his portfolio.192 That day, Stalin dictated a second note for Yagoda, which the bodyguard Vlasik read to him over the phone, informing him of his transfer to the commissariat of communications: “It is a defense-oriented commissariat. I have no doubt you will be able to put this commissariat back on its feet. I urge you to agree”—as if Yagoda could decline.193 The symbolism was ominous: Yagoda would be replacing Rykov, the disgraced rightist with whom his own name had been linked. Yagoda evidently hurtled to Sochi, where Pauker, the NKVD bodyguard directorate head, blocked his suddenly former boss from Stalin’s compound.194 Meanwhile, on September 27, Yagoda’s photograph as the new people’s commissar for communications appeared alongside Yezhov’s in all the newspapers.
Yagoda would spend the next two months on sick leave; he did not make a run for it or try to organize an “accident” to eliminate Yezhov (let alone Stalin).
This was the first removal of an NKVD chief (Dzierżyński and Mężyński had died in office). “This wonderful, wise decision of our parent was ripe,” Kaganovich wrote to Orjonikidze of the appointment of his former party underling. “Things will likely go well with Yezhov at the helm.”195 The middle and lower NKVD ranks also saluted the changeover, and not only from a careerist perspective: many perceived that Yezhov would restore Chekist professionalism (which speaks to their illusions). “The majority of old Chekists were convinced that with the coming to the NKVD of Yezhov we would at last return to the traditions of Dzierżyński, overcome the unhealthy atmosphere and the careerist, degenerating, and fabricating tendencies introduced in the organs during the last years of Yagoda,” one operative recalled. “We thought that now the firm and reliable hand of the Central Committee would rein in the organs.”196 Yezhov moved into his new office at Lubyanka, 2, on September 29, 1936, and that very day Stalin approved a politburo resolution, drafted by his new NKVD chief, “On the Attitude Toward Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite-Zinovievite Elements,” which designated the latter as “foreign agents, spies, subversives, and wreckers on behalf of the foreign bourgeoisie in Europe.”197
ARMING SPAIN, EYEING NAZI GERMANY
Soviet cargo traveled to Spain via the Black Sea, Bosporus, and Mediterranean, or, in a few instances, the Baltic and North seas, in disguised ships, with sailors wearing the tropical clothing of South Asia or the leisure wear of British cruise lines.198 Spanish ports were blockaded, and ships were being attacked by the Nationalists; the undersized Soviet navy would be challenged.199 Still, not a single ship with Soviet arms for Spain would be lost. On October 4, 1936, the first Soviet-supplied but not Soviet-manufactured war matériel secretly arrived at Cartagena: 150 light machine guns, 240 grenade throwers, 100,000 grenades, 20,000 rifles, 16.5 million bullets. Some of these arms turned out to be Great War relics. The rifles were from at least eight different countries of origin (Canada to Japan), of ten different types with six different calibers, making maintenance with spare parts difficult. Some of the best weaponry arrived in insufficient quantities (a mere six excellent Vickers light howitzers, with 6,000 shells). Still, overall the value for the weapons-starved Republic was substantial.200 Three days later, the Soviet Union formally demanded an end to German, Italian, and Portuguese violations of the Non-Intervention Agreement or else the USSR would consider itself not bound by it.201
On October 11, Kaganovich sent Stalin a phonegram reminding him that “we have not communicated anything to Largo Caballero about our [weapons] shipments. We think we should have Gorev inform Largo Caballero officially, but conspiratorially, about the aid . . . that has already arrived, in detail, and when ships arrive in future.” Stalin agreed.202
The next day, 50 Soviet-made light tanks and 51 “volunteer” tank specialists arrived at Cartagena—and the Spaniards raised their fists and shouted hurrah.203 “It erupted to the point of mass hysteria from joy,” wrote Gorev, the Soviet military attaché, in a report that reached Stalin via Voroshilov. “You needed to see it to feel it. Despite the fact that we were ready and are generally calm people, this affected even my subordinates. The euphoria was just exceptional.”204 The T-26B1 tanks, a heavier copy of the British Vickers six-ton model, updated with a Soviet turret and 45-millimeter dual-purpose gun, as well as the Polikarpov I-15 and I-16 aircraft, were of the highest international standards.205 Three days later, fast Soviet Tupolev SB-2 bombers, which had only just gone into full production in early 1936 and were among the most powerful in their class in the world, arrived.206 In the face of such hardware, it was easy to forget that the Soviet Union was in many ways still a poor country: as of October 1936, more than 33,000 young commanders beyond their tours of duty lacked apartments.207
The Soviets were keen to observe German and Italian weaponry in action, and to test their own in battle conditions. Nonetheless, Voroshilov would write privately to Stalin about the “pain” of parting with up-to-date Soviet aircraft, even at world market prices.208
The Spanish Republic had essentially no armaments industry, and even with Soviet production assistance it would need quite some time to produce its own tanks, armored vehicles, or planes.209 Soviet advisers were especially aghast that anarchist-controlled factories produced not the most necessary military items but the most profitable.210 A lack of Spanish government unity frustrated Soviets in-country. “There is no unified security service, since the [Republic] government does not consider this to be very moral,” the NKVD liaison bureau in Spain reported (October 15, 1936). “Each [political] party has therefore created its own security apparatus. In the present government, there are many former policemen with pro-fascist sentiments. Our help is accepted politely, but the vital work that is necessary for the country’s security is sabotaged.”211 Dimitrov and the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti were pushing for “an antifascist state” and a “new kind of democracy,” which implied a pathway for transition to socialism in the Soviet sense.212 But Stalin opposed even backdoor Sovietization.
In an open letter to Largo Caballero (also October 15) published in Soviet and Spanish newspapers, Stalin boasted of Soviet aid that “the workers of the USSR are doing no more than their duty in giving the help they are able to give to the Spanish revolutionary masses.”213 But he paid close attention to the economic costs. The Soviets had recently been informed about the Spanish gold. The Republic’s finance minister, Juan Negrín, negotiated with Ambassador Rosenberg to hand off a large part of the gold reserves stashed in Cartagena for current and future payments. Rosenberg reported (October 15) that the matter had been agreed upon in principle.214 In strictest secrecy, with Negrín on-site, the NKVD’s English-speaking Orlov, posing as a representative of the U.S. Federal Reserve, oversaw the transfer from the caves, evidently enlisting the Soviet tankists who had arrived a few days earlier. On October 25, the same day Stalin was back in Moscow, they loaded 510 metric tons—around 7,800 crates, each weighing 145 pounds—collectively valued at $518 million, onto four ships bound for Odessa.215
Litvinov, for his part, lamented to Rosenberg that “the Spanish question has ruined our relations with England and France and sowed doubts in Bucharest and even Prague.”216 But Stalin would not be cowed: on October 23, the Soviet Union—without relinquishing membership in the Non-Intervention Committee—announced that because of others’ violations, it was not bound by the Non-Intervention Agreement.217 The French were incredulous. “Stalin has no ideals,” complained the secretary general of the French foreign ministry to the British.218 For Stalin, of course, everything was the other way around: the inactions of France and Britain, in the face of blatant Italian fascist and Nazi German violations, had soured him on the Western powers.219
That October of 1936, the German ambassador, Schulenburg, returned from summer leave—and encountered extraordinary warmth, from the Soviet border to the capital, “as if nothing whatsoever had happened.” He informed Berlin that Krestinsky was “extremely friendly and did not refer to events at Nuremberg at all.”220 Stalin’s shopping list for Germany included armored plating, aircraft catapults, underwater listening devices, and warships (costing 200 million reichsmarks), for which the Soviets were offering to pay largely in manganese and chromium ores on the basis of world prices, according to a German memo (October 19).221 On October 20, Hitler bestowed plenipotentiary powers on Hermann Göring to implement the Four-Year Plan by prioritizing weapons production, tightening state controls on exports, and achieving self-sufficiency in essential raw materials, all to reduce imports (costing scarce hard currency) and the impact of a possible blockade. Soviet trade officials were hopeful, as Göring appeared poised to assume a direct role in bilateral trade.222
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SERGO
Orjonikidze’s poor health was deteriorating further, and his autumn rest away from Moscow was proving relentlessly stressful, thanks to Stalin. Whereas a mere 11 of the 823 highest officials of the heavy industry commissariat who belonged to the nomenklatura (those officials who could not be removed without Central Committtee approval) had been fired during the party card verification campaign of spring–summer 1936—with just 9 of them suffering arrest—during the last four months of 1936, 44 senior officials would be fired, 37 of whom would lose their party cards and, with three exceptions, be arrested.223 In October 1936, Stalin had Orjonikidze’s elder brother Papuliya arrested, a first for a relative of a sitting politburo member. Orjonikidze demanded to see his brother, but Lavrenti Beria, the policeman turned party boss in Georgia, where Papuliya worked, said he could allow that only after concluding the investigation.224 Orjonikidze understood that it was not Beria but Stalin who was behind the incarceration.225 On October 8, Stalin had Kaganovich’s deputy Yakov Livshits removed as deputy commissar of railways and, six days later, arrested.226
On October 24, the country effusively celebrated “Comrade Sergo’s” fiftieth birthday in a Union-wide extravaganza. But the industry commissar did not attend the gala, staged near his holiday dacha in Kislovodsk. (His wife went on his behalf.)227 Stalin ordered the arrests of Orjonikidze’s former Caucasus associates Stepan Vardanyan, now party boss in Taganrog and the former leader of reconquered Bolshevik Georgia, and Levan Gogoberidze, party secretary at a factory in the Azov–Black Sea territory and a former party boss of Georgia.228 Happy birthday, Sergo.
How far Stalin would go remained to be seen. On October 25—after two and a half months away—he returned to Moscow to discover an inquiry from the Associated Press in Moscow about rumors that he was ill or perhaps dead. Normally very touchy about discussions of his health, that very day he responded playfully. “As far as I know from the foreign press, I long ago left this sinful world and moved on to the next,” Stalin wrote to the correspondent. “As it is impossible not to trust the foreign press, if one does not want to be crossed out of the list of civilized people, I ask you to believe this report and not to disturb my peace in the silence of that other world.” The delighted AP man dispatched a telegram to the United States on October 26, to the effect that “Stalin refused to deny the rumors of his death.”229
The bulk of Spain’s gold, reaching Odessa by November 2, went by train to Moscow, accompanied by Orlov’s cousin, Ukraine NKVD operative Zinovy Katznelson. Another $155 million (some 2,000 crates) was shipped to Marseilles, as an advance for weapons the Spaniards hoped to purchase from France. A small remainder was taken to a cave in southern Spain. Some of the lot that arrived in the USSR was evidently deposited in the finance commissariat’s precious metal vaults on Nastasinsky Lane on November 6, 1936, in time for Revolution Day.230 Orlov, having accompanied the shipment to Soviet shores, was back in Spain already and, on November 7, celebrated the Bolshevik anniversary in the company of, among others, Koltsov and Gorev, in the latter’s suite at Madrid’s Palace Hotel.231 In parallel, Trotsky had ordered his son in Paris to transfer his archives to the International Institute of Social History, on Rue Michelet in Amsterdam, headed by the Menshevik émigré Boris Nicolaevsky, but Zborowski tipped off the Soviets, and a few days later, on the night of November 6–7, the papers were stolen (cash was left untouched)—another Revolution Day gift for Stalin.
On November 6, Stalin took in the customary Revolution Day performance at the Bolshoi in the imperial box, and the next day he presided over the parade atop the Mausoleum. Bukharin, with his lover, the twenty-three-year-old Anna Larina, was living in Stalin’s old Kremlin apartment, where Nadya had killed herself. He possessed a gun—given to him by Voroshilov, with the ironic inscription TO THE LEADER OF THE GREAT PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION—but did not attempt suicide. He was still listed on the masthead of Izvestiya as editor, so he received a pass to the Revolution Day celebration, in his case for the lowest level of the reviewing stand. Stalin caught sight of him and sent a guard to invite him and Larina up to the Mausoleum, a gesture for all to see—and misread as reconciliation. Not long thereafter, another story has it, Bukharin was being served with an eviction notice for the Kremlin apartment when, suddenly, the apartment’s special Kremlin line rang: it was Stalin, just inquiring how things were going. Bukharin informed him of the eviction, and Stalin appeared to react angrily; the eviction was halted. Stalin was torturing him psychologically.232
Orjonikidze had returned to Moscow for Revolution Day, but on November 9 he would suffer a heart attack and lose consciousness for a time. Stalin responded by intensifying the pressure, driving a public trial of “Trotskyite” saboteurs for a mine explosion in Siberia, which would be afforded expansive press coverage and directly contravene Orjonikidze’s stance on the causes behind industrial mishaps. Treason was made to appear ubiquitous. On November 5, Malenkov had reported to Stalin that 62 former “Trotskyites” had been found to be working in the central army apparatus and military academies. Ten days later, Gamarnik, head of the army’s political administration, and deputy defense commissar, received a list of 92 “Trotskyites” in the Red Army. Altogether, 212 “Trotskyites” were arrested in the military between August and December 1936, but that included just 32 officers, very few of whom were ranked as a major or higher. Despite party pressure and the flow of denunciations, the command staff, concerned with destabilization, exhibited caution.233
NO PASARÁN!
Molotov and other speakers on Revolution Day had blustered about standing up to bullies and how, when confronted, the fascists would desist from further expansionism. But Hitler, after having decided, on emotional grounds, to assist Franco, had quickly imposed limits on his own. He had supplied some 100 planes (fighters, bombers) and nearly 6,500 well-equipped military personnel, the so-called Condor Legion, but he refused the massive troop commitments that Mussolini had made, instead allowing the Nazi intervention to become utterly subordinated to the German war economy. Germany found a place to sell its products and, thanks to monopoly positions with the putschists, obtained desperately needed raw materials and goods (iron ore, pyrites, copper, wolfram, foodstuffs) without having to sacrifice dwindling foreign exchange.234
On November 8, 1936, Franco’s troops began their assault on Madrid from the south. He had put off the offensive, while working to make himself caudillo, a kind of Spanish equivalent of Führer or duce. The delay had allowed the Soviet military adviser Gorev to organize defenses. That day, the first troops of the International Brigades arrived in Madrid. But German and Italian planes had been bombing Spain for a hundred days and, with the Madrid front close to breaking, the Republic government had hastily fled for safety to Valencia. The capital, however, was to be defended. Banners were hung: NO PASARÁN (“They shall not pass”), a Spanish translation of the French slogan of Pétain at Verdun in 1916. Mola’s army, meanwhile, had begun to converge on Madrid from the northwest. Back in October 1936, when asked on the radio which of his four columns would take the capital, he had replied, “The fifth column.” Mola meant that sympathizers to the Nationalists would subvert the Republic from within.235
Fear of such subversion had occurred naturally to Soviet personnel.236 Koltsov had recorded in his diary (November 4–6, 1936) worries about “8,000 fascists who are locked up in several prisons around Madrid,” although the Spanish Republic’s interior minister seemed unconcerned and evacuated himself.237 The logistics of evacuating several thousand prisoners were daunting. Inmates were tied together without their possessions and loaded onto transport—but then, down the road, forced off the buses, verbally abused, and executed by squads of Communists, anarchists, and regular-army men; villagers were press-ganged to dig mass-grave ditches. The executions, in fits and starts over several weeks, killed more than 2,000 prisoners from Madrid jails, without trial, in the worst of the many massacres in the Republic’s zone perpetrated by leading Spanish Communists and their Soviet advisers, Gorev, Orlov, and Koltsov.238 How many of these prisoners were Nationalist sympathizers prepared to take up arms if somehow given them will never be known. In the event, no fifth column materialized, but Mola’s attempted witticism became immortal.239
Madrid came under withering assault for ten days as shrapnel and incendiary shells exploded in its plazas. But Soviet planes had broken the Nationalists’ monopoly of the skies: there was no more bombing of Madrid from low altitude with impunity.240 The Italian Fiat CR-32 and the German Heinkel He-51 proved no match for the more maneuverable I-15 and I-16, while the Soviet SB bomber outperformed the famed Junkers Ju 52. Soviet pilots demonstrated stamina and courage (while gaining invaluable experience: they had had little flight time in training back home). No less crucially, Soviet-led mechanized units, using the T-26, rendered any attempted advance by the Nationalists costly. Soviet tank men would suffer high casualties in Spain: thirty-four killed and nineteen missing in action, casualties of one in seven.241 On November 18, Germany and Italy formally recognized Franco’s Nationalist government, but five days later Franco called off his direct assault on Madrid.242 Morale shifted. “We are finished,” a Nationalist officer told a German military observer. “We cannot stand at any point if the Reds are capable of undertaking counterattacks.”243 In fact, the Republic’s side was too depleted to mount what might have been the decisive counteroffensive.
However much he was motivated by his Trotsky fixation, the high-quality Soviet hardware Stalin sold to Spain showed a desire to strut his stuff.244 In preventing Franco’s seizure of Madrid, the Red Army had indeed demonstrated its mettle for all the world’s skeptics. The French took notice of Soviet aircraft performance in Madrid’s defense; the British, of the overall Soviet effort. “The Soviet government has saved the government in Madrid which everyone expected to collapse,” concluded the undersecretary of state at the foreign office. “The Soviet intervention has indeed completely changed the situation.”245 The Soviet mood was ebullient. “And today,” crowed Koltsov on November 25, 1936, “Franco did not enter the capital.”
SOCIALIST “DEMOCRACY”
That same day, an Eighth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets, attended by 2,016 voting delegates (409 female), opened in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. Stalin’s lengthy oration—broadcast live on Soviet radio for the first time, revealing his soft Georgian accent to millions—concerned a draft text of a new constitution, motivated, he argued, by changes in social structure.246 He had started thinking about a new constitution no later than summer 1934. (On holiday then, he had requested a copy of the current 1924 constitution.)247 He had had a commission approved, which he chaired and which studied foreign constitutions.248 “Behind the Kremlin walls, work is going on to replace the Soviet constitution with a new one, which, according to the declarations of Stalin, Molotov, and others, will be the ‘most democratic in the world,’” Trotsky had written in May 1936, adding that “no one is acquainted with the draft of the constitution as yet.”249 But in June 1936, Stalin had had the draft published for months of public commentary. Soviet propaganda delivered saturation coverage, and claimed that by fall 1936 half a million meetings had been held, encompassing 51 million people.
The new constitution ended legal discrimination against “former people” (kulaks, priests), to considerable complaint from the party rank and file.250 It altered the electoral system for soviets from indirect to direct, from restricted to universal suffrage (returning the vote to former kulaks), and from open to secret balloting.251 Most remarkable, it enumerated a plethora of individual and social rights (pensions, free medical care, education).252 The Menshevik émigré press acknowledged that the terroristic Communist dictatorship was not going to self-liquidate, but nonetheless speculated that the constitution might unleash new political forces.253
Soviet officials worked to orchestrate the public discussions, but some people seized the moment. Collective farmers expressed hatred of the in-kind system of remuneration according to days worked and demanded to be paid in cash, like urban workers. One proposed that instead of the slogan “He who does not work does not eat,” they substitute “He who works should eat.”254 A student at a medical school in Zaporozhie (Ukraine) was reported to have said, “In the USSR we have no democracy and will not have it; everything is done and will be done as Stalin dictates. We will be given neither freedom of the press nor freedom of speech.” After his arrest, some fellow students tried to pass a letter to him in prison praising his courage.255 The constitution’s article on freedom of religion sparked petitions from Orthodox believers to reopen churches. Wishful misunderstandings abounded: that the constitution was reintroducing private property, that kulaks would be allowed to return to their villages, that farmers would “live as before,” that Stalin might abolish the party, because he could not trust it, and institute presidential rule, which would provoke even more political terror (along the lines of Kirov’s murder).256
The draft text omitted the category “the proletariat” in favor of “the people,” which Trotsky disparaged as additional evidence of a retreat from socialism and consolidation of a new ruling class of functionaries (concealed in the term “intelligentsia”).257 “In a private conversation Stalin admitted that we did not have a dictatorship of the proletariat,” Molotov would later recall. “He told me that personally, but not firmly.” 258 Stalin’s Eighth Congress speech was categorical, however. “In 1917, the peoples of the USSR overthrew the bourgeoisie and established a dictatorship of the proletariat, established Soviet power,” he explained. “That is a fact, not a promise. Then the Soviet government eliminated the landlord class and transferred more than 150 million hectares of former landlord, state, and monastery lands to the peasants, and that was in addition to those lands already in peasant hands. That is a fact, not a promise. Then the Soviet government expropriated the capitalist class, took away their banks, factories, railroads, and other means of production, declared them socialist property, and put at the head of these enterprises the best members of the working class. That is a fact, not a promise.” He added that industrialization and collectivization further transformed the social structure, giving the USSR two nonantagonistic classes (workers and peasants) and one stratum (the intelligentsia). This was the first fully authoritative analysis of Soviet society in class terms.
The constitution aspired to reinforce socialist legality—rule by law—a triumph for USSR procurator general Vyshinsky. It also further centralized the state machinery (this was largely omitted in public discussions). Successive drafts had stipulated that the USSR government would exercise jurisdiction over land, water, and natural resources, while decisions of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars would be binding on the republics. The constitution replaced the periodic Congress of Soviets with a permanent USSR Supreme Soviet, to which all republic laws were to be subordinated. (Criminal codes remained the prerogative of republics.) Physically, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic was significantly shrunk as two of its autonomous ethnic republics became full-fledged Union republics—Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—while a third (Karakalpak) was transferred to the Uzbek republic. This brought the number of Central Asian Union republics to five. Also, the South Caucasus Federation was dissolved in favor of the self-standing republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, bringing the total number of Union republics to eleven. For the first time, a Soviet constitution also enshrined the Communist party as “the vanguard of the working people in their struggle to strengthen and develop the socialist system,” and as “the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both public and state.” This appeared not in the section on the state but the one on “public organizations.”
In his speech, Stalin aimed to rebut criticisms in the “bourgeois” press, broadcasting damning views otherwise unavailable to the Soviet populace. Fascist critics, he revealed, dismissed the Soviet constitution as “an empty promise, calculated to pull off a well-known maneuver and deceive people.” Stalin further revealed that “bourgeois” critics on the left were asserting a Soviet shift to the right, away from a dictatorship of the proletariat and toward the same camp as bourgeois countries. He countered that there had been not a shift but a “transformation . . . into a more flexible, . . . more powerful system of leadership of the state by society.” Above all, Stalin said, “bourgeois” critics “talk about democracy. But what is democracy? Democracy in capitalist countries, where there are antagonistic classes, is, in the final analysis, democracy for the strong, democracy for the propertied minority. Democracy in the USSR, by contrast, is democracy for the toilers, that is, democracy for all.” Thus, he concluded, “the USSR constitution is the only thoroughly democratic constitution in the world.”259
EVERYTHING UNRAVELS
On the morning of the Congress’s launch, Pravda had proclaimed Stalin the “genius of the new world, the wisest man of the epoch, the great leader of Communism,” and then deemed his constitution speech a breakthrough for all humanity. While Stalin’s report to the 16th Party Congress (1930) had been published in 11 million copies (twenty-four languages) and the one to the 17th Congress (1934) in 14 million copies (fifty languages), his Congress of Soviets speech was printed in 20 million copies. “No book in the world,” Pravda added, “has ever been published in that kind of print run.”260
In Berlin, on the very same day Stalin delivered his spirited constitution speech, Joachim von Ribbentrop, German ambassador to the UK but also minister plenipotentiary, formally signed an Anti-Comintern Pact with Japanese ambassador Kintomo Mushanokōji. The signing took place not in the foreign ministry but in the Büro Ribbentrop, to stress the pact’s ideological salience.261 Ribbentrop read a statement to the press (the eyewitness William Shirer called it a “harangue”) declaring Germany and Japan “unwilling to tolerate any longer the machinations of the Communist agitators,” and their pact “a turning point in the struggle of all law-abiding and civilized nations against the forces of disintegration.”262
For Japan, keen to contain the Soviet Union while obtaining a free hand in China, this was its first major accord with a European power since abrogation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, in 1920. Indeed, given the infighting, poor communications, deception, and jurisdictional ambiguity inside the Japanese government, the agreement constituted a mini miracle. Japanese newspapers conveyed a lack of enthusiasism (“making lukewarm friends at the expense of red-hot enemies,” wrote Nichi Nichi).263 Above all, Japan’s army had zealously sought firm military commitments against the USSR, but had gotten only “consultations.” Still, it did forge an intelligence liaison with the German staff, focused on the Red Army.264
Hitler relished the propaganda breakthrough, and hoped it would bring along Britain. According to Count Ciano, who had gone on his first official visit to Germany in October 1936, Hitler told him, “If England sees the gradual formation of a group of Powers which are willing to make common front with Germany and Italy under the banner of anti-Bolshevism, if England has the feeling that we have a common organized force in the Far East . . . , not only will she refrain from fighting against us, but she will seek means of agreement and common ground with this new political system.”265 For Stalin, the irony of such a pact was extreme, given how he had bridled the Comintern in both Spain and China.266
Stalin knew beforehand. Colonel Eugen Ott, the German military attaché in Tokyo, had learned in spring 1936, from his Japanese army contacts, of the secret negotiations under way in Berlin. Ott confided in Richard Sorge, the Soviet military intelligence spy in the German embassy in Tokyo, who had informed Moscow. The published text consisted of two short articles.267 But Sorge had been reporting that it contained a secret article. Wrongly, he initially thought this pertained to a military alliance. But he would manage to photograph the full text and get it to Shanghai, whence it was picked up by a Soviet courier.268 The secret section specified that, should either Germany or Japan “become the object of an unprovoked attack by the USSR,” each “obliges itself to take no measures that would tend to ease the situation in the USSR.” Most significantly, the secret clause also enjoined the two powers “to conclude no political treaties with the USSR contrary to the spirit of this agreement without mutual consent.”269
Soviet-German relations sank to a nadir. Stalin had ordered arrest sweeps of German nationals in the USSR in November and seems to have contemplated a separate Moscow trial of some of them. Molotov, on November 29, told the delegates to the Congress of Soviets, “We have no feelings for the great German people other than friendship and genuine respect, but the gentlemen fascists would best be included in that nation, or ‘nation,’ or ‘higher order,’ which is called the ‘nation’ of modern cannibals.”270
Goebbels, the day before Molotov’s address, had crowed to a secret gathering of the Nazi press that Nazism and Bolshevism could never coexist: one must perish.271 “There is no going back,” he confided in his diary (December 1), apropos of Hitler’s thinking. “He outlines the tactics of the Reds. Spain is elevated to a global question. France the next victim. Blum a convinced agent of the Soviets. Zionist and world destroyer. Whoever is victorious in Spain secures the prestige for himself. . . . The authoritarian states (Poland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary) are not secure. The only committed anti-Bolshevik states are Germany, Italy, Japan. Therefore, agreements with them. England will come over when the crisis breaks out in France. Not a love match with Poland but a reasonable relationship.”272
The British foreign office produced an internal memorandum in late November on the expropriation and collectivization of British firms in the Spanish Republic, concluding that it “shows quite clearly that the alternative to Franco is Communism tempered by anarchy; and . . . [it is] further believed that if this last regime is triumphant in Spain it will spread to other countries, notably France.”273 Blum’s Popular Front government, for its part, was engaged in heated internal debate about the future of the Franco-Soviet alliance, and Potyomkin, the Soviet envoy, cautioned patience to the foreign affairs commissariat. But Stalin’s spies had supplied him with General Schweisguth’s memorandum denigrating the Red Army. “On the basis of very reliable information in our possession, I have to inform you for your guidance that the French military authorities are vehemently opposed to a Franco-Soviet [military] pact and speak openly about it,” Litvinov had written to Potyomkin. “We in no way want to speed up negotiations, nor do we wish them to suspect that we are backing away.”274 An unsigned editorial—written by Molotov—in Izvestiya condemned the Anti-Comintern Pact and defiantly noted, “We must believe exclusively in our own strength.”275
ENIGMATIC PLENUM
In the face of the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact, as well as the British and French efforts at accommodating Hitler, Mussolini, and now possibly Franco, on December 4, Stalin convoked a Central Committee plenum. It was, however, devoted not to the deepening challenges of foreign policy—something he almost never allowed to be discussed by the country’s nominal policy-making body—but to virulent charges of treason. The day before, Yezhov had delivered a lengthy address to a conference of NKVD operatives in the capital, itself a telling assembly, and noted ominously, “I think we have not investigated the military Trotskyite line to the fullest. . . . You well know the efforts of imperialist intelligence HQ to create agent networks in our army. . . . We are uncovering diversionary-wrecking organizations in industry. What grounds are there to believe that it is impossible to carry out diversionary acts in the army? There are more opportunities, not fewer, here than in industry.”276
Stalin assigned the main plenum report (“On Trotskyite and Rightist Anti-Soviet Organizations”) to Yezhov, and during his excoriation of the Zinovievites and Trotskyites, someone interjected, “What about Bukharin?” Yezhov took up the prompt, which in turn almost immediately provoked Stalin to interrupt, “We need to talk about them [the rightists].” Beria interjected, “There’s a scoundrel for you!” Stalin, in the July 29, 1936, secret circular, had denied any positive political program to the Trotskyites, but now he asserted that the leftist Trotskyites shared the rightists’ “program” of capitalist restoration.277 Bukharin plaintively asked how he could defend himself against such slanderers. “Do you really believe I could have anything in common with these subversives, with these saboteurs, with these scum, after thirty years in the party?” he exclaimed at Stalin. “This is nothing but madness.” When Bukharin pointed out that he physically could not have been at the alleged meetings with the Zinovievites and Trotskyites, Molotov countered, “You are acting like a lawyer.”278
When Yezhov referred to a transport official as “an enemy,” Stalin interrupted to specify that the accused was “a German spy—he in fact got money for information from German intelligence—he was a spy.” Addressing Bukharin, Stalin ridiculed suicide as opposition blackmail. “Here is one of the easiest means by which, right before death, leaving this world, one can spit in the face of the party, deceive the people, one last time,” Stalin stated, mentioning Tomsky.279 Another was the thirty-two-year-old apparatchik Veniamin Furer, who had committed suicide at a dacha in Osinki, outside Moscow, in fall 1936 after his friend Yakov Livshits—Kaganovich’s top deputy at the railroad commissariat—had been arrested as a “Trotskyite.” Furer, the rising star who had delivered a stirring ode to the Stalinist leadership style at the 17th Party Congress, left behind a long letter praising the Soviet leader while defending Livshits, who, like Furer, had briefly sided with Trotsky in 1923. Because Stalin was on holiday in Sochi, the letter had been brought to Kaganovich. “He walked up and down and then began to sob” out loud, Nikita Khrushchev, another Kaganovich protégé, would recall. “He was unable to collect himself for a long time after he read it.” Kaganovich ordered the letter circulated to all politburo members. Now, at the plenum, Stalin cruelly mocked Kaganovich. “What a letter he left behind,” he noted of Furer. “You read it and tears well up in your eyes.”280
Also on December 4, 1936, in a memo circulated to all politburo members, Stalin dressed down Orjonikidze for having hidden long-ago correspondence with Beso Lominadze, who had been pronounced a posthumous enemy after committing suicide, while party boss, in Magnitogorsk the year before. The accusation of having concealed information from “the Central Committee” was one of Stalin’s most threatening. What also rankled was that Lominadze’s suicide note had been read over the telephone to Orjonikidze by Lominadze’s deputy in Magnitogorsk, and that Orjonikidze was providing a pension to Lominadze’s widow and money to their son (named Sergo, in Orjonikidze’s honor). Stalin had reports that Orjonikidze was bad-mouthing him behind his back to his cronies Mamiya Orakhelashvili and Shalva Eliava.281 At the plenum, Orjonikidze joined in the vicious attacks against Bukharin.
On the evening of December 5, the Congress of Soviets concluded by adopting the new constitution unanimously. The next day was devoted to a mass celebration of the adoption on Red Square. On December 7, the plenum resumed. Despite the venom, it ended without expulsions, let alone arrests. Stalin proposed “considering the matter of Bukharin and Rykov unfinished” and postponing a decision until the next plenum.282 Adding to the mystery, this plenum, uniquely for the 1930s, went unmentioned in the press. That same press took to slandering Bukharin and Rykov still more ferociously. Especially noteworthy was that much of the bile flowed in Izvestiya, where Bukharin remained listed as editor. “My morale,” Bukharin wrote in a letter (December 15), “is in such a state that I am half-alive.”283
KIDNAP
Stalin judged that a Communist takeover in China would never produce a regime strong enough to hold off the Japanese military. After the Chinese comrades formed revolutionary soviets, against Moscow’s advice, he had Dimitrov insist on “soviets—only in the cities, but not as organs of power, rather of organization of the masses. Without confiscations.”284 But the “united front” resembled a sandcastle on the beach. The Nationalists were not interested, either.285 A Japanese envoy arrived on a warship at Nanking, the Nationalist capital, and demanded that China grant Japan the right to place troops anywhere in China to fight Communists. Chiang Kai-shek refused to conduct negotiations himself over the request, and the envoy’s talks with Chiang’s foreign minister went nowhere. (Chiang insisted that Japan respect China’s administrative integrity in northern China, which Japan continued to violate.) But rumors of a possible Chinese entry into the Anti-Comintern Pact had alarmed Stalin. Chiang was also pressing his campaign to eradicate the Chinese Communist base in Shaanxi, while demanding, in negotiations with them in Shanghai, that they bring their Red Army strictly under his Nanking government.286
Events on the ground, however, had their own dynamic—and their import potentially exceeded that of Spain, for Stalin and for the world.
The warlord Zhang Xueliang, known as the Young Marshal, had traveled to Italy, then Germany, courting Mussolini, then Hitler and Göring, for help against Japan. In France he had met Litvinov, asking to be received by Stalin in Moscow; Stalin declined, concerned about not complicating his relations with Japan.287 Zhang had returned to China and eventually entered into negotiations with the Chinese Communists; one of his interlocutors was Zhou Enlai, who got the Young Marshal not only to cease operations against the Chinese Communists but to supply them with weapons. The Communists contemplated trying to secretly admit Zhang to the party.288 In November 1936, Zhang wrote to Chiang Kai-shek, imploring him to pursue a united front with the Communists against Japan in earnest. In December, Zhang traveled to Nanking in person to report about the mutinous moods of his troops in Shaanxi, who were supposed to pursue the Communists, and renewed his pleading. Chiang told him, according to Zhang, that if the government pulled back from fighting the Chinese Communists to take on Japan, the Communists would eventually win hold of the nation.289
Chiang ordered Zhang to intensify the “bandit suppression” campaign to finish off the Communists.290 But Zhang urged Chiang to go to Xi’an and talk to the Shaanxi and Manchurian soldiers. Chiang’s entourage warned against such a trip, but exposure to danger had typically enhanced Chiang’s stature, and he agreed to go. Back in Xi’an, Zhang reported on the conversation, in general terms, by radiogram to Mao, whose “party center” was holed up in dank caves (one bodyguard was stung by a scorpion).291 Chiang flew off to Xi’an with an extra guard detail and contingent of officers, moving into a hot-springs resort, a small walled enclave ten miles outside the district town of Lintong. In an ancient one-story pavilion once used by the Tang emperor Xuanzong, Chiang received delegations of the Shaanxi and Northeast (Manchurian) armies.292 At dawn on December 12, his scheduled day of departure, a 200-man contingent of Zhang’s personal guard stormed the walled compound. A gun battle killed many of Chiang’s bodyguards. He heard the shots, was told the attackers wore fur caps (the headgear of the Manchurian troops), crawled out a window, scaled the compound’s high wall, and ran along a dry moat up a barren hill, accompanied by one bodyguard and one aide. He slipped and fell, losing his false teeth and injuring his back, and sought refuge in a cave on the snow-covered mountain. The next morning, the leader of China—shivering, toothless, barefoot, a robe over his nightshirt—was captured.
Whether Zhang acted on his own or in a conspiracy with the Communists remains uncertain. He was an opium-addled playboy—one mistress was Mussolini’s daughter—but also an anti-Japanese patriot. Perhaps in his earnestness for a united front he had gotten caught up in the intrigues of Zhou and Mao. The wily Chiang, for his part, had been negotiating in bad faith with Zhou Enlai (Chiang’s former political commissar at the Soviet-financed 1920s Whampoa Military Academy).293 News of Chiang’s pending arrest—or admonishment—in Xi’an had reached Mao’s makeshift headquarters via the dilapidated village of Bao’an in the early-morning hours of December 12. His secretary passed him the radiogram. “After reading it, [he] joyfully exclaimed, ‘How about that! Time for bed. Tomorrow there will be good news!’”294
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.”
• • •
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.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги