Stalin полностью

Orjonikidze had returned to Moscow for Revolution Day, but on November 9 he would suffer a heart attack and lose consciousness for a time. Stalin responded by intensifying the pressure, driving a public trial of “Trotskyite” saboteurs for a mine explosion in Siberia, which would be afforded expansive press coverage and directly contravene Orjonikidze’s stance on the causes behind industrial mishaps. Treason was made to appear ubiquitous. On November 5, Malenkov had reported to Stalin that 62 former “Trotskyites” had been found to be working in the central army apparatus and military academies. Ten days later, Gamarnik, head of the army’s political administration, and deputy defense commissar, received a list of 92 “Trotskyites” in the Red Army. Altogether, 212 “Trotskyites” were arrested in the military between August and December 1936, but that included just 32 officers, very few of whom were ranked as a major or higher. Despite party pressure and the flow of denunciations, the command staff, concerned with destabilization, exhibited caution.²³³

NO PASARÁN!

Molotov and other speakers on Revolution Day had blustered about standing up to bullies and how, when confronted, the fascists would desist from further expansionism. But Hitler, after having decided, on emotional grounds, to assist Franco, had quickly imposed limits on his own. He had supplied some 100 planes (fighters, bombers) and nearly 6,500 well-equipped military personnel, the so-called Condor Legion, but he refused the massive troop commitments that Mussolini had made, instead allowing the Nazi intervention to become utterly subordinated to the German war economy. Germany found a place to sell its products and, thanks to monopoly positions with the putschists, obtained desperately needed raw materials and goods (iron ore, pyrites, copper, wolfram, foodstuffs) without having to sacrifice dwindling foreign exchange.²³⁴

On November 8, 1936, Franco’s troops began their assault on Madrid from the south. He had put off the offensive, while working to make himself caudillo, a kind of Spanish equivalent of Führer or duce. The delay had allowed the Soviet military adviser Gorev to organize defenses. That day, the first troops of the International Brigades arrived in Madrid. But German and Italian planes had been bombing Spain for a hundred days and, with the Madrid front close to breaking, the Republic government had hastily fled for safety to Valencia. The capital, however, was to be defended. Banners were hung: NO PASARÁN (“They shall not pass”), a Spanish translation of the French slogan of Pétain at Verdun in 1916. Mola’s army, meanwhile, had begun to converge on Madrid from the northwest. Back in October 1936, when asked on the radio which of his four columns would take the capital, he had replied, “The fifth column.” Mola meant that sympathizers to the Nationalists would subvert the Republic from within.²³⁵

Fear of such subversion had occurred naturally to Soviet personnel.²³⁶ Koltsov had recorded in his diary (November 4–6, 1936) worries about “8,000 fascists who are locked up in several prisons around Madrid,” although the Spanish Republic’s interior minister seemed unconcerned and evacuated himself.²³⁷ The logistics of evacuating several thousand prisoners were daunting. Inmates were tied together without their possessions and loaded onto transport—but then, down the road, forced off the buses, verbally abused, and executed by squads of Communists, anarchists, and regular-army men; villagers were press-ganged to dig mass-grave ditches. The executions, in fits and starts over several weeks, killed more than 2,000 prisoners from Madrid jails, without trial, in the worst of the many massacres in the Republic’s zone perpetrated by leading Spanish Communists and their Soviet advisers, Gorev, Orlov, and Koltsov.²³⁸ How many of these prisoners were Nationalist sympathizers prepared to take up arms if somehow given them will never be known. In the event, no fifth column materialized, but Mola’s attempted witticism became immortal.²³⁹