We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  News of Koltsov’s detention spread quickly. In intellectual circles, the notion that such a man, apparently a trusted patriotic hero and disseminator of the party line, could have fallen foul of the authorities generated first disbelief then panic. The demise of Yezhov had briefly raised hopes of an end to the purges, but Beria was soon to outdo both Yezhov and Yagoda in brutality. The British Embassy in Moscow reported: ‘During the past fortnight, i.e. since Beria’s formal accession to power there have been the usual arrests and rumours of arrests and there is no indication of any falling off in the “purge”.’ After mentioning Koltsov’s arrest and, presumably erroneously, that of Boris Efimovich, the despatch went on:

  We also learn on good authority that Nikolayev, who was head of the Special Section of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs under Yezhov, has been arrested as an enemy of the people, and it is even said that Yezhov’s wife has been taken from the newspaper office where she worked. There seems to be little doubt that Yezhov is slipping fast. In spite of this, his portraits are still for sale in the shops and MacLean, on the occasion of his recent visit to the precincts of the Lubiyanka, was amused to notice in the room where he was received a life-sized portrait of the former ‘master’ and none of the new.132

  Koltsov was astonished to discover that the semi-literate agent who took his first statement started to talk about his alleged involvement in an anti-Stalin conspiracy, along with all those major writers and poets not already in jail. The principal accusation was that he and Evgeni Gnedin, the press chief at the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, were the ringleaders of an anti-Soviet plot involving intellectuals and diplomats. He had allegedly been recruited by the American, the French and the German Intelligence services. His extra-marital relationship with his German lover, Maria Osten, was regarded as proof. He was also accused of being an agent of Trotsky and of having collaborated with the POUM in Spain. Questioned by Beria’s top interrogators Lev Shvartsman and Leonid Raikhman, Koltsov was tortured and finally signed statements admitting connections with a whole range of suspect individuals, some already executed, some under arrest and others still in high positions.

  Gnedin survived to write memoirs in which he described being confronted with Koltsov in August 1939. The interrogators brought Koltsov into the room and Gnedin was shocked by how tired and worn he seemed. Nevertheless, Koltsov’s eyes lit up when he saw his friend. It was a rare flash of the intelligence and humour which reminded Gnedin of the Koltsov of better times. He even managed a joke: ‘Just look at you, Gnedin,’ he grimaced, and paused before saying: ‘Well, as bad as me, actually.’ Gnedin found him a sick, broken man, weary from the months of arrest. Part of his disorientation came from the fact that his glasses had been taken from him and, as he had told Regler, without them ‘everything looks black to me’. Thus, he was ready to admit anything of which he was accused. When he was asked to confess to conspiring with Gnedin and other journalists and diplomats against the Soviet state, he recited parrot-like a story that they had plotted at the apartment of Konstantin A. Umanskii, the Soviet Ambassador to the USA. Gnedin denied all knowledge of this.133

  The interrogators had squeezed plenty out of Koltsov. He admitted that he had been friendly with Karl Radek. He had slept with Yezhov’s wife, confessing to ‘seducing’ her. He had been recruited for French Intelligence by André Malraux. He had worked in Spain with the notorious NKVD defector, Aleksandr Orlov, somewhat ironic given that Orlov himself had been sent to Spain in September 1936 ostensibly as a political attaché with the exclusive task of combating Trotskyism, a task he had fulfilled with savage efficiency. Koltsov made the preposterous admission that he had links with the POUM. Shvartsman and Raikhman produced lists of those he was required to implicate, including the writers Babel, Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg and Aleksei Tolstoi, and diplomats including the Soviet Ambassadors Ivan Maisky in London, Konstantin Umanskii in Washington, right up to Maxim Litvinov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He signed everything put in front of him.134

  Within a few days of the arrest, Aleksandr Fadeiev, the influential Chairman of the Union of Writers, courageously sent a note to Stalin expressing doubts that Koltsov could have committed any kind of crime against the Soviet state, and requesting an audience to discuss the case. Barely a week before Koltsov’s arrest, Fadeiev had published with Aleksei Tolstoi an article praising the Spanish diary as ‘excellent, passionate, brave and poetic’.135 Some months later, Stalin received Fadeiev and sent him into another room accompanied by Poskrëbyshev (Stalin’s personal assistant), who gave him the two green folders with Koltsov’s ‘confessions’. After Fadeiev had read them, Stalin asked: ‘So, now do you believe this?’ to which an extremely uncomfortable Fadeiev answered: ‘I have to.’ Fadeiev later told members of the union, including Konstantin Simonov, that the declarations were terrifying, that Koltsov had ‘admitted’ to being a spy, a Trotskyist and a POUMista.136 By August 1939, the NKVD had enough material to bring formal charges against Koltsov and Gnedin, of masterminding the anti-Soviet conspiracy of intellectuals and diplomats. Koltsov was tried under the infamous Article 58 of the Criminal Code, dealing with anti-Soviet, that is to say political, crimes, which served as the legal basis for the show trials.

  When Koltsov was rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, the official documentation revealed that he was tried for ‘participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy, espionage and carrying out anti-Soviet agitation’.137 At his twenty-minute trial on 1 February 1940, Koltsov retracted his ‘confessions’ on the grounds that they had been extracted by means of horrific tortures.138 He was found guilty and shot the same night or early the next morning. Ever since the assassination of Kirov on 1 December 1934, those sentenced to capital punishment usually had to be shot on the day that the decision was taken and no revision was possible. Nevertheless, Vasily Ulrikh, who presided at the trial, lied to Boris Efimov when he told him that Koltsov had been sentenced to ‘ten years without right of correspondence’ and thus was alive in a camp in the Urals. Ulrikh also blithely told Boris Efimov that ‘for Koltsov to have been arrested, there had to have been proper authority for it’.139 Koltsov was cremated and left in a common grave of unclaimed bodies at the Monastery of Donskoi in Moscow.140 It is not known if his glasses had been returned to him before he faced the firing squad.

  Some, but far from all, of those implicated by his ‘confessions’ were also shot. Gnedin served fifteen years in a concentration camp but survived to write the memoirs in which he described his ‘confrontation’ with Koltsov. Konstantin Umanskii, the Soviet Ambassador to the USA, died in an accident in Mexico and was buried with honours in Moscow. Koltsov’s lover Maria Osten also met with a tragic fate. Against the advice of her friends in Paris, on hearing of Koltsov’s arrest, she had immediately journeyed to Moscow in the hope of being able to help him.141 When she arrived, with the now five-year-old Jusik, Hubert L’Hoste, fearful of being associated with ‘an enemy of the people’ after Koltsov’s arrest, rejected her. When she asked, ‘Do you really believe for a minute that nightmare about Mikhail?’, he responded: ‘Do you think everyone around you is mistaken? How can one individual be more intelligent and correct than everyone else?’ Recently married and wanting the Koltsov apartment for himself and his new bride, he barred the door to Maria and Jusik, who had to go to a seedy hotel.

  Convinced of Koltsov’s innocence, Maria stayed on and took work as a translator at the Writers’ Union. Few of their old friends had time for her, although Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros was one of those who did. When she appealed for help to the exiled leadership of the German Communist Party, Walter Ulbricht refused and recommended that she be investigated as someone who had benefited from the protection of Koltsov. Unaware of the KPD investigation, as late as the summer of 1939, she was optimistic that Koltsov would soon be freed. However, on 14 October 1939, Ulbricht’s machinations bore fruit when she was expelled from the Communist Party on the grounds of ‘insufficient engagement with Party history and the
theory of Marxism-Leninism’. In a vain attempt to find security, she took Soviet citizenship. On 22 June 1941, the day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, she was arrested as a Nazi spy and her adopted son Jusik taken away. Her relationship with Koltsov was regarded as proof of guilt, just as Koltsov’s guilt was taken as proven by his relationship with Osten. Despite the most horrendous tortures, she refused to ‘confess’ to being a Gestapo agent and was shot in the late summer of 1942. In 1947, Hubert L’Hoste was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and sent to a concentration camp in Siberia. He was released after the death of Stalin and died in 1959.142

  7

  A Man of Influence:

  The Case of Louis Fischer

  On many mornings, while shaving and then while soaking in the bath, the Republican prime minister, Juan Negrín, would discuss the international situation in German with a journalist who sat on the toilet seat. Negrín was a man of enormous energy and even greater talent who had little time for the niceties of protocol. To maintain a war effort required an endless struggle with the twin problems of controlling the disparate component forces within Republican politics and of trying to reverse the British, French and American policies of non-intervention that deprived the Republic of the capacity to defend itself. Although immensely discreet, he would take advice where he thought it was useful and evidently one such place was in his bathroom. The man on the toilet seat also dispensed advice to senior Soviet leaders, albeit not at the same time. He was an inveterate traveller whose family lived in Moscow. In the same apartment building lived the notoriously prickly Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov. Negrín’s friend, who also spoke fluent Russian, had gained Litvinov’s confidence to the extent that they would regularly sit in the evenings with children on their laps discussing burning issues of international relations. This German- and Russian-speaking newspaperman was actually an American and one with unusually direct access to the highest circles in Washington, where he had little difficulty in getting to talk to Cordell Hull or Eleanor Roosevelt. Tall, darkly saturnine with hooded eyes, Louis Fischer cut a striking figure among the correspondents in Spain.

  The contacts enjoyed among Spanish, Russian and American leaders by Louis Fischer gave a remarkable authority to what he wrote. The bulk of Fischer’s writing during the Spanish Civil War was first for the New York left-wing weekly The Nation and the New Statesman and Nation of London and then syndicated to more newspapers. Accordingly, his articles are much longer and more reflective than most journalistic despatches during the conflict. In consequence, they fully repay close reading even today. It has been suggested that Fischer constituted ‘the clearest case of complete commitment and almost total abandonment of objectivity’ among the foreign correspondents.1 There can be no doubt about his commitment, although it was hardly greater than that of Herbert Matthews or Jay Allen, or many other respected newspapermen. His vivid and well-informed articles were clearly pro-Republican, but cannot be described as propaganda in the negative sense.

  Because of the range of activities that he undertook on behalf of the Republican cause, the extraordinary energy that he devoted to that cause, and the remarkable and highly unusual level of influence that he seemed to wield in the highest levels of government in both Spain and the United States, Fischer was unique. His influence was actually based on the fact that politicians trusted him because he brought as much information as he took away. He was opinionated and hard-faced, devoid of embarrassment, but trusted because, if he was asked to keep something to himself, he did. Yet, the consequent level of understanding with statesmen and diplomats has been given a sinister spin in some quarters. The furiously anti-Communist cultural critic Stephen Koch portrays Fischer as one of the many tools of Willi Münzenberg and Otto Katz, the men whom he sees as the masterminds of what he calls ‘the secret Soviet war of ideas against the West’.2 The most extreme, not to say deranged, version of this view of Fischer as a Soviet agent emanated from the one-time Socialist civil governor of Albacete, Justo Martínez Amutio, a fervent follower of Francisco Largo Caballero. Deeply embittered by the Communist campaign to remove Largo, which interrupted his own political career, Martínez Amutio wrote memoirs in which he vented his spleen and wildly exaggerated his own importance and knowledge.

  Of Fischer, Martínez Amutio wrote with a characteristic mix of ignorance, invention and malice:

  He was thought to be a German writer fleeing from the Nazis, but other reports presented him as Austrian or Hungarian and also as Czech. The only thing proved for certain was that he acted as a Soviet agent, although he would say that he was not a Communist and that no one had sent him to Spain from Moscow. He got much support from Álvarez del Vayo, who claimed to be an old friend, but Luis Araquistain, who knew him during the period that he was the Republic’s Ambassador in Berlin, warned us of what he really was, a covert Communist and the direct agent of Stalin.

  Martínez Amutio claimed that the political orientation of the entire Communist press and propaganda operation during the Spanish Civil War was in the hands of Fischer. He went even further, making the ludicrous allegation that, together with Artur Stashevsky, the Soviet commercial attaché, and Palmiro Togliatti, the Comintern representative, Fischer cultivated Juan Negrín and, by dint of organizing banquets and orgies for him, turned him into a ‘docile and adaptable’ instrument of Kremlin policy. Martínez Amutio also claimed absurdly that Fischer was one of the Soviet agents who orchestrated the crisis of May 1937, a crisis whose long-term origins in the subsistence problems of Catalonia were beyond any form of orchestration.3 Somewhat more restrained is the version of the historian Stanley G. Payne, who refers to Fischer as ‘an important American correspondent who served as a sort of Soviet agent or source of information in the Republican zone’.4

  The truth about Fischer’s nationality and importance to Soviet policy was rather different. He was born on 29 February 1896 in the Jewish ghetto of Philadelphia, the son of Russian immigrants, although he was not to learn the language of his parents until a quarter of a century later. In 1917, he volunteered to serve in the British Army and served from 8 April 1918 to 14 June 1920 in the 38th Royal Fusiliers, principally as part of the Jewish Legion, spending fifteen months in Palestine. He saw no fighting against the Germans, since the war was over, although he did help defend Jewish settlers from Arab attack. In consequence, he had numerous conflicts with his British officers and was once confined to a brutal punishment camp in the desert for two weeks for going absent without leave. Despite this, the time in Palestine ‘dimmed my Zionism, and Soviet Russia later extinguished it’. He claimed never to have felt deeply Jewish: ‘Palestine and the Jews never stirred me as much as the Spanish Republicans in their struggle against Fascism.’5

  On his return to the USA, he worked in a news agency in New York, where he met the Russian-born pianist Bertha ‘Markoosha’ Mark, with whom he fell in love, following her in 1921 to Berlin. He learned German and began contributing occasional articles to the New York Evening Post. In 1922, he and Markoosha moved to Moscow, where they married and remained for the next nine months. Although both travelled widely, they eventually settled back in Moscow in 1928, where they had two sons, George and Victor. Markoosha was seven years older than Louis and there was always an element of maternal tolerance in her attitude towards him, reflected in the fact that she referred to him in letters as ‘Louinka my dear boy’. There was also a strong element of friendship and mutual support, although their correspondence makes it clear that their way of life – he constantly absent, she carrying the burden of care of the family – was his choice, not hers. Louis was not a monogamous man and on his endless travels he had relationships with many women who, despite his egoism, found him irresistibly attractive.

  One of them, Tatiana Lestchenko, a Russian singer and translator, had an affair with him in the early 1930s and bore him a son called Vanya. Her letters to him reveal an intelligent and independent woman who, as many others would be, was captivated by his sheer energy
: ‘And near you I always feel so warm and silently joyous – as if I were lying in the sunshine.’ She wrote later to a friend: ‘I feel that I am only grateful to LF for giving me the happiness of such a son. All my resentment to LF for his caddish, scoundrely behaviour toward me because I became pregnant – melts. I did love him. And the best of him I kept. I have.’6 Whether it was politics or love, Louis Fischer would always be driven on by a voracious appetite and numerous women would suffer in consequence.

  During his stint in Moscow, Fischer worked on a piece-rate basis for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and, even more sporadically, for the New York Evening Post. He wrote later of how he divided his time between Moscow and the provinces, and lamented that, during his first period in Soviet Russia, ‘I learned much less than I should have’. The reason was, paradoxically, because he spent so much time with his professional colleagues: ‘We correspondents were one big, almost permanent poker party.’’ When they weren’t playing cards, his colleagues generally expressed anti-Soviet attitudes, which seemed to Fischer to be ‘based less on knowledge than on prejudice’. In reaction to this, he developed deep sympathy for the Soviet experiment. At first, while working as a freelancer, he would not start a new article until he knew that the previous one had been published and that he would be paid for it. Because he needed ‘the encouragement of publication’, he wrote less but did much more research than the average correspondent. As he wrote later: