Stalin полностью

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