Stalin полностью

Orjonikidze, in early September 1936, had gone on his annual holiday to Kislovodsk. He wrote to Stalin (September 7) that he had listened to parts of the trial on the radio in Kaganovich’s office. “Shooting them was not enough,” he noted. “If it had been possible, they should have been shot at least ten times. . . . They caused tremendous harm to the party. Now, knowing what they’re made of, you don’t know who’s telling the truth and who’s lying, who’s a friend and who’s a double-dealer. This is the poison they injected into the party. . . . People don’t know whether they can trust this or that former Trotskyite or Zinovievite.” After condemning people who were already dead, he added pointedly: “I am very worried about the army. . . . A skillful enemy could deal us an irreparable blow here: they will start to spread rumors about people and instill distrust in the army. Here we need to be very careful.” Orjonikidze also tried to shield his deputy Pyatakov: “If we do not arrest him, let us send him somewhere, or leave him in the Urals, as at present.”¹³⁹ Stalin had Pyatakov expelled from the Central Committee and the party (September 9) without a meeting. In the NKVD inventory of his confiscated property were his Order of Lenin and his party card, no. 0000059—a low number, indicating very long membership (Pyatakov was one of only six figures mentioned in Lenin’s Testament).¹⁴⁰ On September 11, Stalin answered Orjonikidze from Sochi: “1) Pyatakov is already under arrest. 2) It’s possible Radek will be arrested. Toroshelidze and Budu [Mdivani] are thoroughly stained. They too could be arrested. . . . Greetings to Zina. I. Stalin.”¹⁴¹

SUDDEN DECISION

Policy on Spain took a sudden turn. On August 29, 1936, the politburo had prohibited sending arms, ammunition, or planes to Spain, in accord with the Non-Intervention Agreement, a prohibition Pravda had announced (August 30). On September 2, in a telegram to the Soviet embassy in London, Litvinov had written that “guiding our relationship to the Spanish events is a striving in every possible way to impede the delivery of weapons to the Spanish insurgents and the necessity of strictly curtailing the activities of countries such as Germany, Italy, and Portugal.”¹⁴² But Spanish events were moving rapidly. On September 4, the first Soviet-produced newsreels from Spain were shown in Moscow, and soon they were distributed to other large cities.¹⁴³ That same day, Francisco Largo Caballero, a trade unionist, head of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and Spain’s most prominent civilian politician, became prime minister. The Spanish Communist party accepted an invitation to join the new cabinet in the Popular Front coalition (the anarchists declined).¹⁴⁴ For Moscow, the stakes had been raised. Already, prior to this in early September, the politburo had begun approving, by voice vote, plans for shipments of Soviet industrial goods to Spain. But now Stalin sent a telegram to Kaganovich (September 6, 1936) about how “it would be good” to sell Mexico fifty Soviet bombers, and possibly 20,000 rifles and 20 million cartridges, which could then get to Spain.¹⁴⁵ This short cipher—sent the same day Stalin dressed down the Soviet press summaries of the recent Moscow trial of Trotskyites—effectively set in motion a Soviet military intervention.

Stalin, with Voroshilov (communicating by high-frequency phone), had decided against committing regular Soviet troops.¹⁴⁶ But the politburo had already resolved to form volunteer “international brigades,” to be organized in Paris under the leadership of André Marty, assisted by the Italian Communist party in exile, and funded by Moscow. Many of the volunteers—from the United States, the British Isles, Latin America, and the whole of the European continent, including Nazi Germany and fascist Italy—were not Communists but idealists or adventurers.¹⁴⁷ (The volunteers’ passports would be taken for “safekeeping,” a windfall for the NKVD.)¹⁴⁸ These Comintern brigades remained within the letter of the Non-Intervention Agreement. No Soviet nationals were allowed to join, although many volunteered to.