Madrid came under withering assault for ten days as shrapnel and incendiary shells exploded in its plazas. But Soviet planes had broken the Nationalists’ monopoly of the skies: there was no more bombing of Madrid from low altitude with impunity.240 The Italian Fiat CR-32 and the German Heinkel He-51 proved no match for the more maneuverable I-15 and I-16, while the Soviet SB bomber outperformed the famed Junkers Ju 52. Soviet pilots demonstrated stamina and courage (while gaining invaluable experience: they had had little flight time in training back home). No less crucially, Soviet-led mechanized units, using the T-26, rendered any attempted advance by the Nationalists costly. Soviet tank men would suffer high casualties in Spain: thirty-four killed and nineteen missing in action, casualties of one in seven.241 On November 18, Germany and Italy formally recognized Franco’s Nationalist government, but five days later Franco called off his direct assault on Madrid.242 Morale shifted. “We are finished,” a Nationalist officer told a German military observer. “We cannot stand at any point if the Reds are capable of undertaking counterattacks.”243 In fact, the Republic’s side was too depleted to mount what might have been the decisive counteroffensive.
However much he was motivated by his Trotsky fixation, the high-quality Soviet hardware Stalin sold to Spain showed a desire to strut his stuff.244 In preventing Franco’s seizure of Madrid, the Red Army had indeed demonstrated its mettle for all the world’s skeptics. The French took notice of Soviet aircraft performance in Madrid’s defense; the British, of the overall Soviet effort. “The Soviet government has saved the government in Madrid which everyone expected to collapse,” concluded the undersecretary of state at the foreign office. “The Soviet intervention has indeed completely changed the situation.”245 The Soviet mood was ebullient. “And today,” crowed Koltsov on November 25, 1936, “Franco did not enter the capital.”
SOCIALIST “DEMOCRACY”
That same day, an Eighth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets, attended by 2,016 voting delegates (409 female), opened in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. Stalin’s lengthy oration—broadcast live on Soviet radio for the first time, revealing his soft Georgian accent to millions—concerned a draft text of a new constitution, motivated, he argued, by changes in social structure.246 He had started thinking about a new constitution no later than summer 1934. (On holiday then, he had requested a copy of the current 1924 constitution.)247 He had had a commission approved, which he chaired and which studied foreign constitutions.248 “Behind the Kremlin walls, work is going on to replace the Soviet constitution with a new one, which, according to the declarations of Stalin, Molotov, and others, will be the ‘most democratic in the world,’” Trotsky had written in May 1936, adding that “no one is acquainted with the draft of the constitution as yet.”249 But in June 1936, Stalin had had the draft published for months of public commentary. Soviet propaganda delivered saturation coverage, and claimed that by fall 1936 half a million meetings had been held, encompassing 51 million people.
The new constitution ended legal discrimination against “former people” (kulaks, priests), to considerable complaint from the party rank and file.250 It altered the electoral system for soviets from indirect to direct, from restricted to universal suffrage (returning the vote to former kulaks), and from open to secret balloting.251 Most remarkable, it enumerated a plethora of individual and social rights (pensions, free medical care, education).252 The Menshevik émigré press acknowledged that the terroristic Communist dictatorship was not going to self-liquidate, but nonetheless speculated that the constitution might unleash new political forces.253