Stalin полностью

The Spanish Republic had essentially no armaments industry, and even with Soviet production assistance it would need quite some time to produce its own tanks, armored vehicles, or planes.²⁰⁹ Soviet advisers were especially aghast that anarchist-controlled factories produced not the most necessary military items but the most profitable.²¹⁰ A lack of Spanish government unity frustrated Soviets in-country. “There is no unified security service, since the [Republic] government does not consider this to be very moral,” the NKVD liaison bureau in Spain reported (October 15, 1936). “Each [political] party has therefore created its own security apparatus. In the present government, there are many former policemen with pro-fascist sentiments. Our help is accepted politely, but the vital work that is necessary for the country’s security is sabotaged.”²¹¹ Dimitrov and the Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti were pushing for “an antifascist state” and a “new kind of democracy,” which implied a pathway for transition to socialism in the Soviet sense.²¹² But Stalin opposed even backdoor Sovietization.

In an open letter to Largo Caballero (also October 15) published in Soviet and Spanish newspapers, Stalin boasted of Soviet aid that “the workers of the USSR are doing no more than their duty in giving the help they are able to give to the Spanish revolutionary masses.”²¹³ But he paid close attention to the economic costs. The Soviets had recently been informed about the Spanish gold. The Republic’s finance minister, Juan Negrín, negotiated with Ambassador Rosenberg to hand off a large part of the gold reserves stashed in Cartagena for current and future payments. Rosenberg reported (October 15) that the matter had been agreed upon in principle.²¹⁴ In strictest secrecy, with Negrín on-site, the NKVD’s English-speaking Orlov, posing as a representative of the U.S. Federal Reserve, oversaw the transfer from the caves, evidently enlisting the Soviet tankists who had arrived a few days earlier. On October 25, the same day Stalin was back in Moscow, they loaded 510 metric tons—around 7,800 crates, each weighing 145 pounds—collectively valued at $518 million, onto four ships bound for Odessa.²¹⁵

Litvinov, for his part, lamented to Rosenberg that “the Spanish question has ruined our relations with England and France and sowed doubts in Bucharest and even Prague.”²¹⁶ But Stalin would not be cowed: on October 23, the Soviet Union—without relinquishing membership in the Non-Intervention Committee—announced that because of others’ violations, it was not bound by the Non-Intervention Agreement.²¹⁷ The French were incredulous. “Stalin has no ideals,” complained the secretary general of the French foreign ministry to the British.²¹⁸ For Stalin, of course, everything was the other way around: the inactions of France and Britain, in the face of blatant Italian fascist and Nazi German violations, had soured him on the Western powers.²¹⁹

That October of 1936, the German ambassador, Schulenburg, returned from summer leave—and encountered extraordinary warmth, from the Soviet border to the capital, “as if nothing whatsoever had happened.” He informed Berlin that Krestinsky was “extremely friendly and did not refer to events at Nuremberg at all.”²²⁰ Stalin’s shopping list for Germany included armored plating, aircraft catapults, underwater listening devices, and warships (costing 200 million reichsmarks), for which the Soviets were offering to pay largely in manganese and chromium ores on the basis of world prices, according to a German memo (October 19).²²¹ On October 20, Hitler bestowed plenipotentiary powers on Hermann Göring to implement the Four-Year Plan by prioritizing weapons production, tightening state controls on exports, and achieving self-sufficiency in essential raw materials, all to reduce imports (costing scarce hard currency) and the impact of a possible blockade. Soviet trade officials were hopeful, as Göring appeared poised to assume a direct role in bilateral trade.²²²

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SERGO