Stalin полностью

The next day, Stalin convened an expansive internal gathering on the course of the war in Spain, summoning tankists, aviators, engineers, and others who had firsthand combat experience there. The conclusions reached remain unknown.³⁴ But later in the month of February, he had the politburo approve additional large sales of weapons to Spain, based upon lists submitted by Voroshilov and Uritsky. Stalin, at his tête-à-tête with Pascua, had spoken ill of his own diplomatic representatives in Spain. On February 9, the politburo voted by telephone poll to replace Rosenberg with his deputy Gaikis, who had been recalled for consultations and was on his way to Moscow; Gaikis, too, would vanish.³⁵ Just nine months after the appearance of a Soviet ambassador in Spain, Moscow would again be left without one. Spain, for its part, would withdraw and not replace its ambassador (the next year), leaving its Moscow embassy with more canines than Spanish nationals.³⁶ Republic Spain’s old-line Socialists deeply distrusted Communists and looked on the Soviet Union as never more than a means to an end.

Soviet advisers themselves were often at daggers drawn. Koltsov freelanced as an adviser and Soviet agent with the Soviet military’s connivance, thereby angering Comintern officials who denounced him to Moscow. Berzin complained to Voroshilov and Yezhov of the Spanish government’s dissatisfaction with the decorated NKVD operative Alexander Orlov and recommended his recall. Orlov, who had been promoted to NKVD station chief in Spain, wrote to Moscow, in late February 1937, that Soviet military attaché “Gorev has no military experience. In war affairs he is a child. [Berzin] is a good party member, but he is not an expert—and this is the pinnacle of our command.”³⁷ Gorev complained that “they all blame each other for thousands of mortal sins, gather facts, even the smallest ones, about each other, and accuse one another of interference.” Here was the pot calling the kettle black, for Gorev had written to Voroshilov complaining of the chief Soviet tank commander, General Semyon Krivoshein, that he “has still not learned what can be discussed over the telephone and what is not permitted.”³⁸ Soviet advisers, though, were often caught between a rock and a hard place. “Before my departure, comrade Voroshilov gave me a short directive on the work of our people,” Grigory Stern, promoted to the senior Soviet military official in-country, would report. “Do not in any circumstance issue an order, but . . . do everything necessary for victory.”³⁹

Predictably, Voroshilov violated his own strictures, issuing specific orders, down to the movement of tanks, as he tried to direct entire military operations from Moscow.⁴⁰

Whether because they came to understand what Stalin wanted to hear or themselves shared the conspiratorial worldview, Soviet military advisers increasingly wrote of treachery. “The fascist intervention in Spain and the Trotskyite-Bukharinite bands arming in our country are the link in a single chain,” one adviser reported to Moscow. Similarly, Stashevsky, the top Soviet political operative in Spain, wrote to Moscow, “I am sure there are provocations everywhere, and it is not excluded that a fascist organization exists among the [Republic’s] higher officers.” Some actual or would-be agents of Italian intelligence and the Gestapo were being uncovered and arrested behind Republic lines, but it was hard to know if this was what Stashevsky meant.⁴¹ Stalin demanded investigations, but he meant of treacherous Soviet advisers: “Check every cipher clerk, radio operator, and generally every employee in communications, and fill the headquarters with new people, loyal and fight-capable. . . . Without this radical measure the Republicans will certainly lose the war. This is our firm conviction.”⁴²

WAR OF ATTRITION