The Comintern executive committee was also discussing China—it aimed to rein in the Chinese Communists, who were not following the Comintern policy of cooperation with Chiang against the Japanese.49 At the end of the Long March, Mao had arrived in Yan’an, in China’s northwest, where the Communists set up a ministate. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist (Guomindang) government, based in Nanking, wanted to isolate the Reds, a task he assigned to Zhang Xueliang, whom the Japanese had chased from Manchuria. Zhang had his headquarters in Xi’an, 200 miles north of Mao, and commanded a sprawling force of perhaps 300,000.Only in late June or early July 1936, after an almost two-year hiatus, was a radio link reestablished between Moscow and the Chinese Communists in the remote interior, and the Chinese comrades asked the Comintern to provide $3 million monthly to cover military expenses, help organize contributions from the Chinese diaspora, and send Soviet aircraft, artillery, antiaircraft artillery, infantry rifles, machine guns, and pontoons, through either Xinjiang or Mongolia.50 But at the July 23 Comintern meeting, Dimitrov insisted that “the task in China right now consists not in expanding the regions under soviets and the Chinese Red Army, but . . . unification of the vast majority of the Chinese people against the Japanese invaders.” The goal was to “complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution,” although eventually, “in the process of this struggle, the moment will come for the mass organization of the struggle for Soviet power.”51
Four days later, Dimitrov submitted draft directives for the Chinese Communists to Stalin, who would take some time to return them. In the meantime, the Comintern directives to Spain’s Communists to avoid revolution arrived just as the Spanish Republic state began to melt away. Jails were being cracked open, court records ransacked, village rents pronounced null and void, and businesses collectivized. Spain’s moderate Socialists, together with Spain’s Communists, could not contain the workers, peasants, and anarchists in the Republic’s zone, especially in Catalonia, where 70 percent of industry would be collectivized in three heady months. “The first impression: armed workers, rifles on their shoulders, but wearing their civilian clothes,” Franz Borkenau, an Austrian writer who had quit the German Communist party in protest over Stalin’s rule and traveled to Spain, would observe. “And no ‘bourgeoisie’ whatever!”52
To stand by while the leftist Popular Front and popular revolution in Spain went down to “fascist” armed aggression would threaten Moscow’s prestige. Sometime between July 27 and 29, 1936, the head of the Spanish Communist party sent a cipher responding in detail to Comintern questions about “the correlation of forces,” which Dimitrov forwarded immediately to Stalin. “The adversary has the advantage that he has many spies in the government camp,” the Spanish report concluded. “Despite that, if France will deliver the requested aid in the form of airplanes and ammunition, the adversary will be destroyed.”53 Would Stalin step into the breach? A genuine leftist revolution was unfolding in Spain against his instructions, and the Chinese Communists were pressing revolution against orders as well. Rendering this situation still more maddening was the circumstance that he was being
THE TROTSKY CHALLENGE
Stalin hated Trotsky with a deep, emotional, blind, wild hate; he also feared him, in a way he feared no one else. Trotsky had long been under nearly total NKVD surveillance, first on an island in Turkey and then in France. The NKVD knew of or had inspired a plan by the anti-Soviet émigré Russian All-Military Union to assassinate him in 1934, but operational amateurism produced nothing beyond recriminations.54 In 1935, Trotsky had accepted an offer of asylum from the new Norwegian Labor Party government, taking up residence with his wife as guests of the journalist, painter, and parliamentarian Konrad Knudsen in Oslo, where the NKVD had few resources.55 But Trotsky’s elder son, Lev Sedov, the nerve center of international Trotskyism (such as it was), had remained in Paris, where the Soviet secret police enjoyed a robust presence. Boris Atanasov, known as Afanasyev (b. 1902), an ethnic Bulgarian assassin and kidnapper who oversaw infiltration of émigré circles in Paris, had been tasked with penetration of Trotsky’s Paris operation.