In 1937, the peak of the Purge terror, Davies managed to spend most days of the year outside Russia, some of it cruising the Baltic on the Sea Cloud, with his astonished Soviet secret police guards along as invited guests. At the end of his stay in Moscow, he was overjoyed when Stalin granted him a two-hour audience, after the dictator had refused to meet other Western ambassadors. “He is really a fine, upstanding, great man!” Davies told an underling at the embassy. Of all the foreign deniers who turned an unseeing eye to Stalin’s mass murder this staunchly capitalist couple were certainly the strangest.
Soviet officials who dealt with Americans during the 1930s are by now all dead, as are almost all the surviving Purge victims themselves. Russian archives, once briefly accessible in the early 1990s, when I was able to read the transcripts of interrogations of half a dozen Americans arrested in the Purge, are again now mostly closed. This is an American as well as a Soviet story, and in telling it skillfully from a wide variety of rarely used and mostly American sources, The Forsaken etches a small piece of a great historical cataclysm and reminds us of how Stalin’s regime devoured not just human lives but hopes, dreams, trust. Those American baseball players who came to Russia found themselves in a tragic game with no umpire, either in the Kremlin or the U.S. embassy. Their story made me wonder whether the several mass grave sites I saw in Russia—one of them full of exposed bones bleached white under an electrical transmission tower on a foggy, rocky, wind-swept hillside in Kolyma—might have contained any of my countrymen who were once catchers, pitchers, or first basemen.
2008
SEVENTEEN
A Homage to Homage
FOR ANY IDEALIST WHO DREAMED of forging a more democratic and equitable world, the late 1930s were a grim time. Not only did Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini rule as dictators in Germany and Italy, but half a dozen other countries, from Portugal to Lithuania, Hungary to Greece, were under regimes of the far right, some of them, like the Nazis, making dark threats against Jews. Even in England, the British Union of Fascists boasted fifty thousand members; wearing black tunics, black trousers, and wide black leather belts, they paraded through Jewish neighborhoods of London under a flag with a lightning bolt, shouting insults, giving the straight-arm salute, and beating up anyone in their way. “Fascism has spread its great black wings over Europe,” wrote the French writer André Malraux.
Nowhere were those wings spread more ominously than over Spain. After centuries of monarchy, it had become a republic in 1931 and was Europe’s newest democracy. In early 1936, Spanish voters had elected a coalition of liberal and leftist parties, which promised reforms that would begin to rectify the country’s vast imbalance of wealth between industrialists and workers and between a small elite of large landowners and a great mass of miserably poor, often illiterate peasants. Months of unrest followed the election, and then, in July of that year, a large group of right-wing army officers made a brutal grab for power, igniting civil war.
In the first weeks of fighting, the plotters and their troops occupied roughly a third of Spain. Quickly emerging as the dominant figure among them was a tough-talking young general, Francisco Franco—ambitious, puritanical, devoutly Catholic, and possessed by a fierce belief that he was destined to save his country from a deadly conspiracy of Bolsheviks, Freemasons, and Jews. He spoke of Germany as “a model which we will always keep before us” and kept a photo of Hitler on his desk. “It is necessary to spread terror,” declared another general, Emilio Mola. “We have to create the impression of mastery by eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do.”
And eliminated they were, with a violence far greater than anything seen when Hitler or Mussolini first seized power. As Franco’s armies advanced through Spain, they showed a ferocity that Europeans had assumed as their right in colonial wars but that had seldom been unleashed in Europe itself since the Inquisition. Trade union leaders and Spanish Republic officials, including forty parliamentary deputies from the governing coalition, were shot or bayoneted to death. Torture was routine. Killings mounted into the tens of thousands, some carried out with the garrote, a medieval instrument with which the executioner slowly, if he is so inclined, tightens a metal band around the victim’s neck.
As with many fundamentalist movements, for Franco’s followers, women became the object of particular savagery. Many who had been union members or supporters of the Republic were branded on their breasts with the military rebels’ symbol, also drawn from medieval times, of yoke and arrows: the yoke of obedience to an all-powerful kingdom, and the arrows for shooting down heretics. Others were gang-raped by entire platoons of Franco’s soldiers—something that officers actually boasted about to foreign reporters covering the war.
As such news spread, tens of thousands of Franco supporters in Republican-controlled territory, including many clergy, were massacred in revenge. Anticlericalism, demands for regional autonomy, and animosity between Spain’s rich and poor, all of which had been building for centuries, boiled over. For the first time since 1918 a western European country was at war.
As the Republic fought back against the attempted coup, it faced great odds: most regular army officers had joined Franco, and Hitler and Mussolini quickly began supplying his forces with the most modern weaponry, including airplanes, tanks, and the crews to man them. Italy sent entire divisions of infantrymen. Against these forces the Republic mustered a smaller number of loyal officers and soldiers and, trained hastily or not at all, badly armed militias organized by trade unions or left-wing political parties. Even though Spain was a highly patriarchal society, many militia units included women. Desperately short of rifles, artillery, tanks, and warplanes, the Republic tried to buy these arms overseas. But Britain, France, and the United States were leery of the Republic’s left-leaning government and loath to fuel a war that might engulf the whole continent. They refused to sell weapons to either side in the Spanish Civil War and pressured smaller countries to follow their lead.
Ironically, the only major nation that finally did sell arms to the Spanish Republic was not another democracy: it was the Soviet Union, just then beginning at home the enormous bloodletting of the Great Purge. In return for providing weapons, pilots, and military experts, Joseph Stalin demanded high positions for Spanish communists and Soviet advisers in the Republic’s army and security services. He also instructed communist parties around the world to begin recruiting foreign volunteers to fight in Spain. Before long, more than 35,000 came, from some fifty countries.
Besides these International Brigades, as they were called, several thousand additional foreigners came to Republican Spain, both to volunteer as soldiers and for other work. These men and women were leftists but not communists. And they were drawn not just to the battle against fascism but to something else as well. Throughout the northeastern part of the country, particularly in Catalonia and neighboring Aragon, after the popular militias had swiftly defeated Franco’s attempted coup, there spontaneously erupted the most widespread social revolution ever seen in western Europe. Peasants occupied dozens of large estates; railway workers took over the train lines and trolley drivers the urban transport systems. Workers took over factories, including Ford and General Motors plants. The Ritz Hotel was Barcelona’s most elegant; cooks, waiters and busboys took over its dining room, converting it into People’s Cafeteria #1 for the poor. The anarchist trade union federation occupied the city’s Chamber of Commerce building and began using stock certificates as scratch paper. Garbage trucks sported anarchist slogans. Some villages abolished money and issued coupons, with more coupons going to families with more children. Exhilaratingly, this was a revolution that came not, as in Stalin’s Russia, from the top down but, something many radicals had long dreamed of, from the bottom up.
The upheaval’s epicenter was Spain’s second-largest city, Barcelona. A few days after Christmas 1936, a foreign volunteer, a young American economist named Charles Orr, was working in the office of the POUM—
Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification—a group with its own militia at the front. “A little militiaman, in his blue coveralls and red scarf, trudged up the stairs to my office on the fourth floor,” Orr remembered later. “The lifts, as usual, bore the familiar sign NO FUNCTIONA. . . .
“There was an Englishman, he reported to me, who spoke neither Catalan nor Spanish. . . . I went down to see who this Englishman was and what his business might be.
“There I met him—Eric Blair—tall, lanky and tired, having just that hour arrived from London. . . .
“Exhausted, but excited, after a day and a night on the train, he had come to fight fascism. . . . At first, I did not take this English volunteer very seriously. Just one more foreigner come to help . . . apparently a political innocent.” The newcomer spoke of a book he had written, about living as a tramp in England and washing dishes in Paris restaurants. But Orr had not heard of it, nor of the several novels by this “gawky” figure.
“To us he was just Eric . . . one of a small band of foreigners, mostly British, fighting on the Aragon Front.” This was where Blair would be sent, northwest of Barcelona, when he promptly joined the militia of the POUM. He “was tongue-tied, stammered and seemed to be afraid of people,” Orr wrote. But however inhibited the newcomer was in conversation, he was anything but that in print, where he wrote under the name George Orwell.
Like Orr, few people anywhere had then heard of the 33-year-old author, who had been supporting himself largely as a part-time bookstore clerk and by running a tiny grocery shop out of his home. (He put “grocer” as his occupation when he applied to join the POUM militia.) He had finished the book that would first bring him wide notice, The Road to Wigan Pier, a close-up look at poverty in the industrial north of England, but it had not yet been published.
Along with other foreigners with whom he crossed paths in Barcelona—one, for example, was 23-year-old Willy Brandt, who three decades later would become chancellor of West Germany—Orwell quickly found himself under the spell of the revolutionary city:
Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said “Señor” or “Don” or even “Usted”; everyone called everyone else “Comrade” and “Thou.” . . . Almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from an hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. . . . The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. . . . Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.
Within a week, Orwell was on his way to the front. A photograph of his militia column shows him a head taller and some fifteen years older than the Spanish teenagers he is surrounded by. The book he would write about the following six months, Homage to Catalonia, is the one in which for the first time he fully found his voice. In 1940 he would refer to it as his “best book,” and for many of us that judgment still holds.
Orwell was always an acute, deeply thoughtful observer of everything he saw—even when, as would be the case in Spain, it didn’t fit the script he had expected. Indeed, part of the moral drama of this book lies in the way we can see him find the politics around him far more complicated than the black-and-white picture in his mind at the start. After more than three-quarters of a century, this quality still makes his account a lasting piece of literature. And we now know more about an eerie backstory to his experiences in Spain that Orwell only dimly sensed, and about the odd way his explicit instructions for revising the book were, for decades after his death, ignored.
• • •
In Spain, Orwell never stopped examining everything that happened to him. Who can forget his description of exactly what it feels like to be hit by a bullet? “It was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion.” Yet part of what makes Homage to Catalonia one of the great nonfiction books of its age is that he managed to write in the first person without ever sounding self-centered. You can look at almost any page and see how deftly he amasses rich, sensual detail, but always in the service of a larger point. For example, after that sniper’s shot almost severed his carotid artery, he was put on a hospital train to the rear. As it pulled into one station, a troop train filled with Italian volunteers was pulling out for the front, “packed to the bursting-point with men, with field-guns lashed on the open trucks and more men clustering round the guns.”
I remember with particular vividness the spectacle of that train passing in the yellow evening light; window after window full of dark, smiling faces, the long tilted barrels of the guns, the scarlet scarves fluttering–all this gliding slowly past us against a turquoise-coloured sea.
. . . The men who were well enough to stand had moved across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.
Within the Spanish Civil War was another civil war. An odd-bedfellows alliance between communists and the Republic’s mainstream parties was determined to crush the social revolution. Several of their reasons were understandable: they thought it was folly to try to build a new utopia in the midst of a desperate war for survival; they felt that the best hope of defeating Franco was with a disciplined army under a central command, not a hodgepodge of militia units reporting to political parties and labor unions; and, still hoping to buy arms from Britain, France, or the United States, they feared this would never happen if Republican Spain were perceived as revolutionary. (As it turned out, these countries would refuse to sell arms to the Republic even after the revolution was finally snuffed out.) But another factor was the long reach of the Soviet Union’s Great Purge. In Stalin’s eyes, any dissenters from the world communist movement were traitors. He was far less angry at the driving force behind the social revolution, Spain’s powerful anarchist movement, which came from a different political tradition, than he was at the anarchists’ allies, the much smaller POUM. Several POUM leaders were former communists, one of whom had lived in the Soviet Union and had known Stalin, who had broken publicly with the USSR and denounced the Purge. To the Soviet dictator, this was unforgivable heresy.
Orwell first became aware of how intense these conflicts were when, after the several months at the front described so vividly in his early chapters, in late April 1937, he returned to Barcelona on leave. Within a few days of arriving in the city, he was unexpectedly caught up in a deadly outburst of street fighting between the communist-dominated police on one side and the POUM and its anarchist allies on the other. Although Orwell himself was unharmed, several hundred people were killed. Deeply distressed, he returned to the front line. Some weeks later, after he was wounded, hospitalized, and discharged from the militia, his voice was still hoarse from the bullet that had passed through his neck, grazing his throat; it sounded, his commanding officer wrote, like the grinding brakes of an old Model T Ford. Orwell then made his way back to Barcelona again, to meet his wife, Eileen O‘Shaughnessy Blair, who had for several months been working in the POUM office, and to head home with her to England to recuperate.
It was then that he discovered, to his horror, that the POUM and its newspaper had been banned and many of its supporters thrown in jail. He stayed out of sight for several days—once on the street meeting Willy Brandt, who was also lying low, and once sleeping in a vacant lot—while he and Eileen arranged to slip out of the country before they, too, could be arrested. Sh
e told him how, several days before, six plainclothes police had burst into her hotel room and taken all the couple’s letters, books, and documents, including the extensive notes and diaries Orwell had sent her, and she had typed up, from his first four months at the front. (He “was always writing,” an Irish fellow soldier remembered. “In the daytime he used to sit outside the dugout writing, and in the evenings he used to write by candlelight.”) This must have been a particularly painful loss. Yet even in describing the theft of his own writing Orwell was alert to a curious human detail of the search of Eileen’s room:
They sounded the walls, took up the mats, examined the floor, felt the curtains, probed under the bath and the radiator, emptied every drawer and suitcase and felt every garment and held it up to the light. . . . In one drawer there was a number of packets of cigarette papers. They picked each packet to pieces and examined each paper separately, in case there should be messages written on them. Altogether they were on the job for nearly two hours. Yet all this time they never searched the bed. My wife was lying in bed all the while; obviously there might have been half a dozen sub-machine-guns under the mattress, not to mention a library of Trotskyist documents under the pillow. Yet the detectives made no move to touch the bed, never even looked underneath it. . . . The police were almost entirely under Communist control, and these men were probably Communist Party members themselves. But they were also Spaniards, and to turn a woman out of bed was a little too much for them.
Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 23