Afanasyev stumbled upon an unbelievably valuable agent: Mordka “Mark” Zborowski (b. 1908), who had been born in a Jewish family in imperial Russia and, after the revolution, resettled in Poland, where he eventually joined the Polish Communists. After an arrest and short prison sentence, Zborowski fled to Berlin, then to Grenoble, where he attended university, and was recruited into the NKVD in Paris around 1933.56 Zborowski befriended Sedov’s wife, who recommended him for the position of her husband’s secretary. “At present the source meets with the son nearly every day,” Zborowski’s secret police handler reported to Moscow, which responded that “we caution that you do not go too far and thereby destroy all our plans in this machination.”57 The NKVD was able to install listening devices on the telephones in the apartments of Sedov and his collaborators. Zborowski also gained access to secret lists of, and correspondence with, trusted Trotsky loyalists worldwide, on the basis of which the NKVD compiled a card catalog. Zborowski, known to Sedov as Étienne, a fluent Russian speaker in an otherwise French-only milieu, took charge of Sedov’s correspondence and helped edit Trotsky’s Russian-language Bulletin of the Opposition. Stalin, therefore, could read not only Trotsky’s mail but also drafts of his essays, sometimes before they were published.58
Knowing what Trotsky would publish did not help counter it, however. Events in Spain afforded him a grand new platform from which to bash Stalin still more—as a counterrevolutionary who failed to support not a theoretical but an actual revolution under direct attack by “fascism.” On July 30, Trotsky, in high dudgeon, wrote that in “curbing the social revolution,” Spain’s Popular Front leaders “compel the workers and peasants to spill ten times as much of their own blood in a civil war. And to crown everything, these gentlemen expect to disarm the workers again after the victory and to force them to respect the sacred laws of private property.”59 By that date, Nazi German planes had not only airlifted Franco’s africanistas to the Spanish mainland, but also begun strafing Madrid. Also on July 30, two of the initial Italian squadron of twelve Savoia-Marchetti medium bombers sent from Sardinia to Morocco to assist the Spanish insurgency had crash-landed in French Algeria, revealing Italian involvement.60 The “fascists” had stolen the initiative. More than that even, with the Spanish Republic state dissolving, someone else could fill the vacuum. Stalin seemed to be facing a possibly victorious Trotskyism in Spain, where Trotsky was popular. The specter of Trotskyites capturing a physical redoubt in a real country would seize Stalin like the proverbial red cape in front of a bull.61
DICTATOR’S DILEMMA
Members of Stalin’s inner circle strove to circumscribe the expanding effects of his reopening of the Kirov murder case. Pravda, back on June 2, 1936, had published a speech by Pavel Postyshev, a candidate member of the politburo and party boss of Kiev province, upbraiding Ukrainian officials for unwarranted repressions; five days later, the newspaper editorialized (“Lessons of the Donbass”) that the coal plan fulfillment failures in Ukraine had resulted not from wrecking but from showy record-breaking labor stunts as well as the wrongful persecution of engineers.62 This was a prominent theme of Orjonikidze’s as well. “What kind of saboteurs?” he defiantly exclaimed at a multiday meeting of the guiding council of the heavy industry commissariat on June 25. “During the 19-year existence of Soviet power, we . . . have graduated more than 100,000 engineers and a similar number of technicians. If all of them, and the old-regime engineers as well, whom we have reeducated, turned out to be saboteurs in 1936, then congratulate yourself with such success. What kind of saboteurs! They are not saboteurs, but good people, our sons, our brothers, our comrades. . . . They will die on the front of Soviet power, if this is required. . . . It is not sabotage—this is nonsense—but incompetence.” Orjonikidze’s spirited defense elicited “rousing and prolonged applause.”63
