The British had signed a declaration with Italy pledging to “respect the status quo on the Mediterranean” (which further complicated already difficult Soviet shipments to Republic Spain).369 “He who sups with the devil,” Izvestiya had huffed at Britain’s accommodation of the Italian fascists, “should have a long spoon” (January 5, 1937).370 What is more, Stalin learned—from intercepted and decoded U.S. State Department communications—that Britain was preparing to demand from the Soviet Union the creation of a classical liberal-conservative, rather than Republican-socialist, government in Spain, and, “if Moscow refuses, then cut a deal with Germany and Italy.” That ultimatum never came, but Britain was seeking accommodation with Germany over Spain.371 France also stepped up its efforts to overcome mutual hostility with Germany. The fear that the bourgeois-democratic capitalists (Britain, France) were keen to align with the fascist-capitalists (Germany, Italy, and a Francoist Spain) haunted Stalin.
His determination to counter the perceived danger of a Trotskyite beachhead on Spanish Republic territory, as well as Trotsky’s relentless barrage of writings about the betrayal of the revolution, cannot be separated from these geopolitical concerns. Indeed, Trotskyism for Stalin was a geopolitical concern.372 Trotskyites in Spain were few, insignificant, and under venomous attack even from Trotsky. But Stalin had a darkly expansive view of threats.373 Moreover, Trotsky, though a single person, reached a worldwide audience. At the same time, Stalin would not have been Stalin had he not also perceived a threat as a grand opportunity. He had no more instigated the kidnapping of Chiang in China than he had the putsch by Sanjurjo, Mola, and Franco in Spain, but he had turned both actions to his advantage. The apparent necessity of preventing Trotskyism in Spain would conveniently provide Stalin with vivid justification for his annihilation of “enemies” at home as well. He transformed his Spanish challenge into a domestic cudgel. The place of Trotsky inside Stalin’s head was immense, and Trotsky was occupying a similar enormity in the consciousness of the entire country and, to some extent, Spain—both nemesis and ever-handy instrument. But it also began with Stalin’s determination to smash his inner circle, his instinct to bully and humiliate turning ever more vicious.
CHAPTER 7ENEMIES HUNTING ENEMIES
“I think, I think, and I can’t understand anything. What is happening?” Koltsov used to repeat, walking up and down in his office. . . . “These are people we have known for years, with whom we lived next door! . . . I feel I’m going crazy. I’m a member of the editorial board of Pravda, a well-known journalist . . . it would seem I should be able to explain to others the sense of what is happening, the reasons for so many unmaskings and arrests. But in fact, I, like the last terrified philistine, know nothing, understand nothing, I’m bewildered, wander in the dark.”
BORIS YEFIMOV, Soviet caricaturist, talking about his brother Mikhail Koltsov 1
INTO 1937, the Soviet colossus would seem to have been at the height of its power, helping to stave off Franco’s seizure of Madrid with its military hardware and know-how, but the USSR itself had fallen under grim siege. The NKVD was suffering a massacre—and not after it had arrested at least 1.6 million people but all the while it was doing so. Between late 1936 and late 1938, arrests of NKVD personnel exceeded 20,000. The NKVD’s Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB), which directly perpetrated the wholesale bloodletting, was decimated: around 2,300 of the 22,000 state security operatives were arrested—269 in the center and 2,064 in locales—of whom the great bulk (1,862) were charged with “counterrevolution.”2 All eighteen “commissars of state security” (the top ranks) who served under Yagoda would be shot, with a single exception (who would be poisoned). Stalin also decimated his top military commanders, while constantly reminding the public that an attack on the Soviet Union was imminent, indeed that a new imperialist war had already started over Spain.
