From the very beginning of the fighting the Soviet people had firmly and resolutely taken sides with Spanish democracy. As early as 6 August 1936 more than 100,000 people came together in Red Square, in a demonstration presided over by Nikolai Shvernik, the chairman of the Central Council of Soviet Trade Unions, to declare their support for the Spanish Republic.6
Soon after, the women workers of the Trekhgornaia textile factory launched a passionate appeal to give generously in aid of Spanish women and children. A considerable sum was quickly forthcoming. The money was used to buy food and clothing. The donations for Spain were shipped on board the Neva and the Kuban, which transported their cargo in good order to the Spanish port of Alicante at the end of September/beginning of October.7 Declarations of solidarity were approved in many factories in the capital. The workers in GPZ -1, the Dynamo Works, the Aviakhim brakes factory, Samotochek, the Kuibyshev electrical factory and others approved a decision to donate one half of 1 per cent of their month’s wages to Spain.8
They appealed to workers throughout the country to collect money. An account was set up in the State Bank, into which more than 2 million roubles were paid in August and September alone. 9 Spain was on everybody’s lips. People sang Spanish songs, learned Spanish and published Spanish poets. A Spanish delegation sailed down the newly opened Moscow–Volga Canal.10 Spanish sailors were given a rapturous reception on landing in Odessa; the Basque football team toured the country and played against a Leningrad team, among others.11 People took in Spanish children and war orphans.12
All this makes it clear that the campaign for solidarity with Spain was more than a passing fad. The Spanish Civil War was a symbol for the more general war that threatened; solidarity with Spain was a symbol for the link with Europe and the world; it was proof that the Soviet Union did not stand alone.
A world in meltdown, war scare
The war scare was no invention of Pravda editors or the Politburo, but reality. And Spain was the code word that stood for the world in which the fragile security system created by the Versailles Treaty was falling apart without any new security architecture to take its place. Other trouble spots flared up in the columns of Pravda: reports about German activities in Czechoslovakia; friction on the German–Polish frontier. At the heart of all these problems was a general nervousness about Germany’s posturings, in particular the fact that it had moved from a policy of attempting to revise the Versailles Treaty to one of rearmament and territorial revision, affecting Austria, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and Poland. There was an ominous process of escalation: the repudiation of the arms limitations of the Versailles Treaty and the reintroduction of universal conscription in March 1935; the naval agreement with Great Britain in June 1935; the occupation of the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland in March 1936; the Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg in September 1936, with inflammatory anti-Bolshevik speeches; the establishment of the Berlin–Rome Axis in October 1936; recognition of the Franco regime in November 1936; the anti-Comintern pact with Japan in November 1936; the Anschluss with Austria on 13 March 1938; growing pressure on Czechoslovakia and the forced cession of the Sudetenland at the Munich Conference in September 1938; the invasion of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939; and demands for the return of Danzig to the Reich and the incursion of German troops into the Memel territory in March 1939.
The world was by now full of subversion, diversionary activities, diplomatic interventions and a growing wave of inflammatory propaganda. There was an escalation of frontier violations, provocations and probing manoeuvres to see how far one could go. Agents and spies began to be more important than diplomats; para-diplomacy began to displace the real thing, while paramilitary forces did the preliminary spadework for the real armed forces.13 The summer of 1937 saw clashes on the Manchurian frontier as well as intensified activities by Gestapo agents in Czechoslovakia with the aim of strengthening German posts on the German–Polish frontier.14
While Germany, Japan and Italy were joining together in the Axis pact, all efforts failed to create a collective security system that would bring Britain, France and the Soviet Union together. At the Munich Conference of September 1938, the break-up of Czechoslovakia was agreed between Britain, France and Italy, and in March 1939 the rump of Czechoslovakia was occupied. The capitulation of the Western powers in Munich in September 1938 was followed by Stalin’s capitulation in Moscow on 23 August 1939, when he took the even more extreme step of acquiescing in a temporary collaboration with Hitler in the occupation and division of Eastern Europe.
All in all, we are looking at a highly ominous scenario. The plot thickened in Moscow in 1937, when the external conflicts merged with domestic ones and ordinary internal differences hardened out into extreme tensions, in which people with critical views were denigrated as spies while opponents were labelled traitors. The external fronts of conflict on the world stage were now extended into the domestic arena.
Figure 6.1 Poster by V. Koretskii (1937)
‘Greetings to fighters against fascism. The constitution of the USSR is a moral aid and support for everyone committed today to the struggle against fascist barbarism.’
The Soviet nation as a patriotic fighting unit
The external war had now become a backdrop for identifying and settling internal conflicts. One gradually and steadily becomes aware that the struggle was not at an end but had been steadily radicalized and intensified in a kind of ‘last battle’. Since the internal enemy had basically been vanquished and had thus lost its foundation in society, its last resort could only be to place itself at the disposal of the external enemy if it wished to enlist further support. There was a striking synchronicity between the formation of an external and an internal front. The need for an internal enemy was coordinated with the image of the external enemy. This facilitated the formulation of an optimal mobilization strategy. Developments on the external front were thus not simply objective givens, but were dramatized to suit the production of scenarios for internal conflict and to focus on concrete enemies within. Welding the nation into a whole is most plausible and has the greatest impact when it feels threatened and its powers of resistance are most effectively mobilized. This was best achieved by a confrontation with an external enemy and its internal agents, the ‘Fifth Column’.
The tactic of drawing the nation together and mobilizing to meet a threat was successful during the first Moscow show trial, when the defeated grandees of the old opposition were for one last time transformed into agents of fascism – it was hardly a coincidence that the large-scale demonstrations of solidarity with the Spanish people and the Popular Front should have taken place at the same time as the hate campaign calling for the annihilation of ‘Trotskyist agents’. By the time the second trial came round, the ‘agent’ motif had become indispensable and was coordinated with the new constellation. The ‘wreckers’ were said to be at work from one end of the country to the other in the service of the Axis Powers, who had joined forces in a pact hostile to the Comintern and who were now encircling the fatherland. The activities of Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan were said to be increasing in number and intensity. The trial scripts took it as read that the accused intended to cede large parts of the Soviet Far East to Japan and Ukraine to Germany so that the latter could satisfy its needs for raw materials.15
In the third show trial, the breaking up of the Soviet Union at the behest and in the interests of particular foreign powers had become the main plank of the prosecution. The men in the dock stood accused of
spying on behalf of foreign powers, wrecking, diversionary activities, terror, undermining the Soviet armed forces, provoking an attack on the USSR by those powers, breaking up the USSR and forcing the cession of Ukraine, Belorussia, the Central Asian Republics, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Far Eastern coastal territories (Primorsky Krai) in favour of the above-mentioned foreign powers, and, lastly, the overthrow of the socialist social and political order existing in the USSR, the reinstatement of capita
lism and the restoration of the power of the bourgeoisie.16
This show trial coincided with the approaching defeat of the Spanish Republic and the further advance of Nazi Germany. The death sentences passed on Bukharin and others were announced on the same day that the German army marched into Austria and Austria was absorbed into Germany: 13 March 1938.
In this and subsequent trials the indictment was formulated increasingly with an eye to the international situation. The emphasis on foreign policy in the design of the indictment was not confined to the charges against the prominent figures in the show trials. The target groups selected for persecution in 1937, the ‘national contingents’, were portrayed as ethnic groups on Soviet soil, acting on the instructions of their native countries. These included the Germans – ethnic Germans, émigré Germans from the Reich, stateless Germans; Austrians, who were now counted as belonging to the ‘Greater German Reich’; Hungarians, who might jump on the coattails of the Greater German Reich; and Poles, who might stir up the Poles, Belorussians and Ukrainians on the Soviet side of the frontier. This was then extended to include Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Finns, who, as inhabitants of the neighbouring states, could undermine the USSR from the periphery. Koreans who had settled in the marginal territories, and so might be susceptible to Japanese overtures, were also targeted. The image of the enemy was nationalistic and xenophobic because, instead of reckoning with individuals and an individual sense of responsibility, the preference was to stigmatize national groups collectively.17 The new identity of ‘the Soviet nation’, a community predicated on its readiness for war, was constructed by distinguishing it from its enemies, which were to be found within its own precincts and not merely beyond its frontiers. Soviet patriotism was born long before the Great Patriotic War.18 Its most important theme was not nostalgia for the empire, a remake of the old holy or tsarist Russia, but the self-assertion of a nation driven into modernity and surrounded by warlike preparations and aggression. Nothing could weld together a new nation that had emerged out of war and civil war more powerfully than the overwhelming fear of a relapse into the ‘time of confusions’; nothing could be identified more clearly and unambiguously than an enemy in whom every diffuse threat and anxiety could be concentrated. Mere pride in what had been achieved in the course of reconstruction and in the Five-Year Plans would not suffice to create or sustain a sense of solidarity that could overcome the fragmentation of the nation. It might almost be said that, if the dynamic of war and the threat of war had not existed, the Stalinist leadership might have had to invent them. It is no doubt a paradox, although not an inexplicable one, that the power that detected the workings of enemy agents in anything and everything should have remained utterly blind to every threat at the very moment when the National Socialist army marched up to its frontiers. And conversely, when confronted with an enemy of superior force and radical determination, the nation ought finally to have recognized that enemy, the true enemy, as opposed to the invented enemies that the ruling clique was forced to conjure up in order to sustain its own authority. We cannot grasp the pandemonium that reigned at the heart of Soviet society without recalling the fear that a new world war might break out, and without the efforts of an unscrupulous regime to intensify this fear.
Metastases: show trial in Barcelona, the NKVD abroad
In the minds of an entire generation, Spain became the focal point of the impassioned struggle between freedom and oppression, good and evil, self-sacrifice to the point of death and cold-blooded power politics. The sympathies of the world came down on the side of the Republic, the volunteer units of the International Brigades, and the Soviet Union, which supported the Republic, profited from this nimbus. Who would have wished to repudiate a programme like the one produced by the Communist International in 1935, reversing the suicidal, divisive policy it had pursued hitherto? What counted now were not partisan egoisms and sectarian interests; what mattered now was not the building of socialism or a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but resistance to fascism and the defence or victory of democracy.
At the same time, it was discovered in Spain that the unity of all anti-fascists, the watchword that so many had regarded as plausible, independently of their party allegiances and world views, had been poisoned from the very outset by the tactics adopted by the communists so as to exploit the alliance for their own purposes and by their ruthless attempts to assert their own claims to leadership. This meant that, when the gifts of money and supplies collected from the Soviet people arrived on the battlefields of the Iberian peninsula, they were accompanied by a piece of the Moscow of 1937. The Soviet Union provided not just goods and money but also the personnel with whose aid they hoped to control the movement in Spain – military advisers, agents, secret policemen and killers. The Spanish government had approached the Soviet Union for aid as early as 25 July 1936. The first military advisers arrived in August and September. By the end of November 1937 there were more than 700 Soviet military advisers, NKVD agents and economic experts.19
Unlike the situation at home in the USSR, a public sphere still existed in Spain. There were journalists who could elude the censor, reporters – such as George Orwell – who could go public with what they had witnessed. Soviet advisers and agents in the ranks of the Republic – in the army and security services, above all – had quickly moved into positions where they could exercise control, and this rapidly produced the kind of climate that dominated in Moscow in the Yezhov years. George Orwell watched the birth of this world with astonishment and gave a description of it: ‘You had all the while a hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police.’20 Orwell describes the atmosphere in Barcelona in spring 1937, when the communists had come to power and had violently suppressed the syndicalist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) and the anarchists:
In Barcelona, during all those last weeks I spent there, there was a peculiar evil feeling in the air – an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty and veiled hatred … And yet there was a perpetual vague sense of danger, a consciousness of some evil thing that was impending. However little you were actually conspiring, the atmosphere forced you to feel like a conspirator. You seemed to spend all your time holding whispered conversations in corners of cafés and wondering whether that person at the next table was a police spy.21
Absurd though the criticisms of the non-communist left were, the commonsense point of view could still make itself heard – for example, on the subject of the criticisms of the radical left-wing POUM. Everyone knew that the POUM consisted of militant rebels and revolutionaries and no one could pretend that they were collaborating with Franco. ‘The thing was opposed to commonsense, and the past history of the P.O.U.M. was enough to make it incredible.’22 In Catalonia, a space that was still protected at least in part by the presence of an international public opinion, it was evident ‘that libels and press-campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist cause.’23
Memoirs by participants in the war, the dossiers that were sent to Moscow week after week by Soviet military advisers and agents, and the reports of journalists and reporters derived from Soviet sources – Louis Fischer’s report to Uritskii, for example24 – allow us a glimpse of the view from the inside: what the Soviet specialists thought of the personnel of the Republic, how they judged the internal Spanish parties and their squabbles, how they evaluated the political attitudes, the military capabilities and the networks of members of the International Brigades. Here too we find a way of thinking, an analytical template, familiar from our understanding of Moscow conditions. Mistakes, defects, inadequacies are instantly condemned as sabotage or wrecking. Lack of discipline becomes ‘mutiny’, ricochets in battle become ‘terrorist attacks’, sudden illness is instantly associated with poisoned chocolate. ‘The surrender of Brunete and the flight of many brigades were, to a significant extent, the result of a panic sown by the “fi
fth column” that the fascists had gotten around our forces.’25 Defeats are never ascribed to defective equipment or leadership failings, but are explained by ‘the immense and intensive activity and work of the defeatist elements and agents of the fifth column within the Republican units.’26
From very early on an internal instruction could assert: ‘Rid the army, the police and the organizations of authority from top to bottom, of the enemies of the people.’27 It is claimed categorically that the war against Franco could be won only if the ‘internal enemies’ – anarchists, Trotskyists, syndicalists – were eliminated. ‘It goes without saying that it is impossible to win the war against the rebels if these scum within the Republican camp are not liquidated.’28
Nikonov, another agent, wrote in his report on 20 February 1937:
The second serious task on the agenda is to overcome the demoralizing activity carried out by some leaders of the anarcho-syndicalists and counter-revolutionary Trotskyists. The anarchists have the strongest influence in Catalonia. Here they have a large, organized political and military bureaucracy. The policy of the so-called orthodox among the anarcho-syndicalist leaders is essentially treason.29
It is conceded that the volunteers in the International Brigades do not lack the courage to make sacrifices, but ‘at the same time one should not forget that the internationalists were a mixed bag, both socially and politically; that there was vacillation all around them; nor the fact that the Spanish Republic appeared to many international soldiers to be their future homeland with which they associated their personal interests and future.’30 In the final analysis, the defeat of the Republican forces is attributed to treachery, and, according to this logic, the liquidation of all persons to be held responsible for it lies behind every intervention. Its units had been infiltrated, it was alleged, by secret service personnel of every nationality. Only a robust security apparatus could master the situation. ‘In a few cases we succeeded in catching the provocateurs red-handed, and they suffered the requisite punishment right then’, we learn from the agent Colonel Zverkhovskii, ‘but the overwhelming majority of the agents, because of the general weakness of the command and the political apparatus and the lack of special institutions, remained undetected and did their base and vile business almost with impunity.’31 NKVD agents were in huge demand:
Moscow, 1937 Page 16