The Battle for Spain Read online

  15

  The Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic

  During October 1936 the nationalists concentrated their best forces on the renewed attack towards the capital from the south-west. Their relentless advance made it look as if the Spanish Republic was mortally stricken, but the defence of Madrid soon became a rallying call throughout Europe to all those who feared and hated the triumphant forces of ‘international fascism’. The communist slogan that ‘Madrid will be the grave of fascism’ was powerfully emotive and the battle for the capital was to help the party to power. From 38,000 members in the spring of 1936, the Communist Party was to increase to 200,000 by the end of the year and 300,000 by March 1937.1

  The Spanish Communist Party was ordered by the Comintern leaders, Dmitri Manuilski and Georgi Dimitrov, to collaborate in the defeat of the rebellion and the defence of a democratic and independent Spanish Republic. This strategy, decided at the time that the Soviet Union was joining the Non-Intervention Committee, conformed to various political objectives: first, to combat the impression that Spain was undergoing a revolution to install a communist regime; second, to counter the claim of their enemy, relying on outside help, that theirs was a national movement; third, to try to reconcile Leninism with the traditional idea of Spanish liberalism.2

  Nevertheless, the situation was hardly encouraging. The military position became worse day by day. Madrid appeared doomed after the defeat at Talavera while Bilbao was threatened after the loss of Irún and San Sebastián. The republicans had still not managed to take Oviedo, they had failed at Toledo and the anarchists’ offensive against Saragossa had come to a halt. They managed to hold on north of Madrid in the Sierra de Guadarrama, but that, like all republican successes, was purely a defensive action.

  These setbacks and the strong German and Italian support for the nationalists made Dimitrov, the secretary general of the Comintern, consider intervention by the Soviet Union. On 28 August he wrote in his diary: ‘The question of aiding the Spanish (possible organization of an international corps).’ On 3 September he wrote: ‘The situation in Spain is critical.’ And on 14 September he noted: ‘Organize help for the Spanish (in a covert form).’3

  For some years, the question of Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War has been polarized between two schematic versions: it was either a Comintern strategy to establish a Soviet regime serving the orders of Moscow, or on the other hand a heroic USSR, motherland of the proletariat, disinterestedly helping the legally constituted Republic. Neither of these two conflicting interpretations is correct, but the latter is definitely further from the rather complicated truth.4

  Since the 1920s the Soviet presence in Spain had increased, mainly in the form of cultural propaganda. The Comintern had done no more than it had in other Western countries: infiltrate and wait. On receiving news of the coup d’état of 18 July 1936, the Comintern had gathered as much information as possible from its principal agents, especially the Argentinian Vittorio Codovilla, who had been the Spanish Communist Party’s controller since 1932, while the Soviet authorities considered their position. Stalin, as we have seen, did not come to a decision to intervene until September, two months after the rising. Only then did the Soviet regime consider the possibilities of exploiting the conflict and gaining domestic and international support. The Politburo in Moscow ordered huge demonstrations to be organized while the Comintern initiated an international campaign. Soviet citizens contributed 274 million roubles (approximately £11,416,000) for humanitarian purposes in republican Spain.5

  The Soviet government sent Mikhail Koltsov, the most famous Pravda correspondent, to Spain, followed by two film-makers, Roman Karmen and Boris Makaseev. Three weeks after their arrival newsreels from the Spanish front were being screened in Moscow cinemas and articles were published almost on a daily basis in the Soviet press. On 21 August the Soviet government appointed Marcel Rosenberg ambassador in Madrid, and a month later the old bolshevik who led the assault on the Winter Palace, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, as consul general in Barcelona. In the meantime Ilya Ehrenburg, the correspondent of Izvestia, kept Rosenberg informed on the conflict of Catalan politics and Companys’s complaints against the central government. The Politburo also appointed Jacob Gaikis to the embassy secretariat and Artur Stashevsky as commercial attaché.

  Among the military advisers were General Jan Berzin (‘Grishin’), Vladimir E. Gorev (‘Sancho’) as military attaché, Nikolai Kuznetsov (‘Kolya’) as naval attaché and Yakov Smushkevich (‘Duglas’) as air force adviser. The majority of the senior military men in Spain were from Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. The Soviet embassy was set up in the Hotel Palace until eight weeks later when it followed the government to Valencia. The Comintern sent its own team, with Palmiro Togliatti (‘Ercole’ or ‘Alfredo’), the leader of the Italian Communist Party in exile and one of the chief influences on Comintern decision making. He later became the main adviser to the Spanish Communist Party. The Hungarian Erno Gerö (‘Pedro’) performed a similar role with the PSUC in Barcelona. The most terrifying adviser to come to Spain was Aleksander Orlov, the representative of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, who was to take charge of the secret police.6

  At first, the French Communist Party and its leaders provided the main source of communication for the Comintern’s directives. Soon, communications on arms shipments, reports from GRU officers and Soviet military advisers were radioed either in the morning or in the evening direct to a transmitter in the Sparrow Hills next to what is now Moscow University.7

  The government of Largo Caballero approved on 16 September the establishment of an embassy in Moscow. Five days later the socialist doctor Marcelino Pascua, who spoke Russian and had visited the Soviet Union to study public health, was named ambassador. Dr Pascua was received in Moscow with great ceremony and deference, and allowed access to Stalin. On the other hand the republican government did nothing to make Pascua’s task easy.8

  The Soviet authorities knew from their intelligence service, the NKVD, and from Comintern representatives of the critical situation in which the Republic found itself towards the end of August. The secretary general of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, presented a report on 16 September to the Comintern outlining the Republic’s lack of a regular army and chain of command. On 22 September Codovilla called for ‘arms above everything else’. As a result, Soviet military intelligence prepared a contingency plan for military assistance and the organization of a GRU group to carry it out. It was completed on 24 September and bore the codename Operation ‘X’. Kliment Voroshilov, the minister of defence and an old crony of Stalin’s from the Russian civil war, informed the Kremlin ten days later that the sale had been prepared for 80 to 100 T-26 tanks, based on a Vickers model, and 50 to 60 fighters. Stalin gave his approval.9

  More important than the quantity of armaments sent was their quality. This varied enormously. Rifles and field guns were often in a bad state and obsolete. One batch of guns of Tsarist vintage was known as ‘the battery of Catherine the Great’. The ten different sorts of rifles came from eight countries and required rounds of six different calibres. Many of them had been captured during the First World War and some of them were fifty years old.10 The T-26 and later BT-5 tanks, on the other hand, were entirely modern and better than the opposing German models. The aircraft, although modern by Soviet standards, were soon out-fought and out-flown by the new German aircraft which came into service the following year.

  The main barrier to achieving the best use of all this matériel came from the sectarianism of the communists, who jealously kept it for the use of their own forces. Regimental commanders were sometimes forced to become members of the Communist Party to ensure that their men received ammunition and medical care. The advisers, especially the tank commander General Pavlov (‘Pablito’) and the air force adviser Smushkevich, took all the decisions, often without consulting their Spanish colleagues. Prieto, the minister for air, found that the Sov
iet advisers and the senior Spanish air force officer, Colonel Hidalgo de Cisneros y López de Montenegro, an aristocrat with strong communist leanings, would not even tell him which airfields were being used, or how many aircraft were serviceable. Prieto’s fellow socialist, Luis Araquistáin, said that the real minister of air was the Russian general.

  This was no exaggeration. One report back to Moscow clearly demonstrates that Smushkevich, or ‘Duglas’ as he was known, controlled the republican air force completely. ‘The Department is headed by Colonel Cisneros. [He is] a very honest and strong-willed officer who enjoys a great authority both in aviation and in governmental circles, and is a friend of the Soviet Union. There is no doubt that at this moment he lacks both theoretical knowledge and tactical experience to lead the air force on his own. He realizes this and accepts our help with honesty and gratitude. S[mushkevich] as the Chief Adviser has established the best possible relations with him…It can be said quite clearly that while remaining officially in the position of an adviser, Smushkevich is in fact the commander of all of the air force.’11

  One of the most important issues of the Spanish Civil War is the payment of Soviet aid with the gold reserves of Banco de España.12 Spain at the time had the fourth largest gold reserves in the world, due mainly to the commercial boom during the First World War. It would appear that Artur Stashevsky, the Russian economist, was the one who suggested to the minister of finance, Dr Juan Negrín, the idea of keeping ‘a current account in gold’ in Moscow. Madrid was threatened by the advance of the Army of Africa and this arrangement could be used to buy arms and raw materials.13 The gold would be converted into foreign exchange through the Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord, or Eurobank in Paris (both part of the Kremlin’s financial organization in France).

  On 24 July Giral had authorized the first despatch of gold, in this case to Paris, to pay for armament purchases in France. When the NonIntervention Committee began its work, gold was still sent until March 1937 in order to buy arms from other sources. Altogether 174 tons of gold (27.4 per cent of the total Spanish reserves) went to France.14

  On 13 September 1936 the council of ministers authorized Negrínto transfer the remaining gold and silver from the Banco de España to Moscow. Two days later 10,000 crates full of precious metal left the Atocha station and reached the magazines of La Algameca in the port of Cartagena on 17 September. Another 2,200 cases, were sent to Marseilles and the rest, 7,800 cases, was shipped to Moscow via Odessa. This consignment was accompanied by NKVD personnel and guarded by a detachment of carabineros. On reaching Odessa the 173rd NKVD Rifle Regiment took over guard duties.15 These 510 tons of precious metals were worth at least $518 million at 1936 values.16 One of the first bills the Republic had to pay with the gold amounted to $51,160,168. It was for the ‘fraternal military support’ already provided.17 It is very hard to judge the Soviet method of accounting when they calculated what the Republic owed for arms and other expenses, such as shipping and the training of republican troops and specialists. Nothing was free and many charges appear to have been exaggerated to say the least. The Soviet Union claimed that with the credits it provided in 1938 (after the current account in gold had been exhausted, according to their calculations), the Republic had received $661 million worth of goods and services, yet only $518 million in gold had been sent to Moscow. But the Soviet figure does not reveal the creative accounting which took place when changing gold into roubles, and roubles into dollars, and dollars into pesetas. At a time when the rouble–dollar exchange rate was fixed at 5.3:1, the Soviet Union was using the figure of 2.5:1, a difference which netted it a very considerable profit.

  When news leaked out of the transfer of the gold reserves to Paris and Moscow, the value of the republican peseta collapsed on the foreign exchanges, falling by half between November and December. The cost of imports became a terrible burden for an already battered economy and the cost of living shot up.18

  Negrín’s role at this time was important for future developments. While organizing the despatch of the gold to Moscow, he became extremely close to Stashevsky, a Pole sent by Moscow as the Soviet economic attaché. Stashevsky immediately recognized that Negrín was more than just somebody the Soviet Union could trust. Negrín believed fervently in the centralization of political power and that also meant economic power. ‘Our opinion’, Stashevsky reported to Moscow, ‘is that everything possible has to be done to support the concentration of all the exports and imports–i.e. all foreign currency operations–in the same hands.’19

  Both Negrín and Stashevsky were furious with the Generalitat and the anarchists in Catalonia for taking financial affairs into their own hands. ‘Catalonians are seizing without any control hundreds of millions of pesetas from the branch of the Banco de España,’ Stashevsky reported to Moscow.20 In their view the fact that the central government had done nothing to help Catalan industry was irrelevant. They also hated the Soviet consul-general in Barcelona, Antonov-Ovseyenko, who clearly sympathized with Companys and got on well with the anarchist leader García Oliver. ‘García Oliver does not object to the unified leadership or to discipline in battle,’ Antonov-Ovseyenko recorded, ‘but he is against the restoration of the permanent status of officers, this foundation of militarism. It is with obvious pleasure that he listens to me when I express agreement with his military plan.’21

  Antonov-Ovseyenko also noted the comments of the Esquerra minister, Jaume Miravitlles: ‘Anarcho-syndicalists are becoming more and more cautious in their management of industry. They have given up their idea of introducing egalitarianism in large enterprises.’ Antonov-Ovseyenko, the Bolshevik leader who stormed the Winter Palace, had become an associate of Trotsky and a member of the left opposition, but his abject statement that August, confessing his faults and condemning his former comrades, did not save him from Stalinist suspicion.22 He may well have been one of those functionaries sent to Spain as a way of preparing their downfall later. The old bolshevik completely failed to see the danger he was in. He asked Soviet advisers and the central government to support an offensive in Catalonia. On 6 October 1936 the consul-general sent a detailed report to Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador in Spain: ‘Our view of anarchism in Catalonia is an erroneous one…The government is really willing to organize defence and it is doing a lot in that direction, for example they are setting up a general staff headed by a clever specialist instead of the former committee of anti-fascist militias.’ His words were ignored. Comintern propaganda regarded Catalonia and Aragón as ‘the kingdom of the Spanish Makhnovist faction’. And since it had been the Red Army which had destroyed the Makhnovist anarchists in the Ukraine, Antonov-Ovseyenko should have seen the warning signs.23

  He then moved into the realm of international relations, supporting the Generalitat’s contacts with Moroccans, and promising them independence for the colony in the hope of creating an uprising in Franco’s recruiting ground. ‘Two weeks ago’, he reported to Moscow, ‘a delegation of the national committee of Morocco, which can be trusted because it has a lot of influence among the tribes of Spanish Morocco, started negotiations with the Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias. The Moroccans would immediately start an uprising if the republican government guaranteed that Morocco would become an independent state if it succeeded and also on the condition that Moroccans would immediately receive financial support. The Catalan committee is inclined to sign such an agreement and sent a special delegation to Madrid ten days ago. Caballero didn’t express an opinion and suggested that the Moroccan delegation negotiates directly with [the central government].’24 Although such a move was considered by the central government and the Spanish Communist Party, this démarche was angrily rejected by Moscow. The last thing Stalin wanted was to provoke France, whose own colony in Morocco might be encouraged to revolt, and to give the British the impression that communists were stirring up worldwide revolution.

  Antonov-Ovseyenko appears to have been doomed by the criticisms of Stashevsky and Negrín. This
came to a head the following February when Antonov-Ovseyenko ‘showed himself to be a very ardent defender of Catalonia’. Negrín remarked that he was ‘more Catalonian than the Catalans themselves’. Antonov-Ovseyenko retorted that he was ‘a revolutionary, not a bureaucrat’. Negrín declared in reply that he was going to resign because he regarded the statement by the consul as political mistrust and while he was ready ‘to fight the Basques and Catalans, he did not want to fight the USSR’. Stashevsky reported all this to Moscow (one even wonders whether he and Negrín provoked Antonov-Ovseyenko on purpose) and the consul-general’s days were numbered.25

  As a result of the reports from Spain expressing total frustration with Largo Caballero’s determination to thwart communist power in the army, the Kremlin was looking for ‘a strong and loyal’ politician who would be able to control events internally, impress the bourgeois democracies, especially Britain and France, and put an end to the ‘outrages committed by some of the provinces’. Stashevsky had already seen Negrín as the ideal candidate. In late 1936 he reported to Moscow: ‘The finance minister has a great deal of common sense and is quite close to us.’26 But although Stashevsky’s advice was followed, he was to suffer the same fate as Antonov-Ovseyenko. In June 1937 he, Berzin and Antonov-Ovseyenko were all recalled to Moscow where they were executed. Stashevsky’s great mistake was to have complained in April 1937 about the vicious activities of the NKVD in Spain, a curious blunder from one so politically aware.

  16

  The International Brigades and the Soviet Advisers

  During the Spanish Civil War the Comintern was best known for having created the International Brigades. Although the exact origin of the idea remains uncertain, it came with the first calls for international support for the Spanish Republic–a form of solidarity, it was felt, which should have a military dimension.1 On 3 August the Comintern approved a first resolution in general terms, no doubt waiting for a clear signal from the conspicuously silent Kremlin. Only on 18 September, after Stalin had made up his mind, did the secretariat dictate a resolution on ‘the campaign of support in the struggle of the Spanish people’, of which point No. 7 read: ‘proceed to the recruitment of volunteers with military experience from the workers of all countries, with the purpose of sending them to Spain’.2