Above all, Voroshilov had no control over Yezhov, who hungered for Stalin’s approval. In the Little Corner, the despot tutored Yezhov on portraying a conspiracy with a shadow government, ready to take over: Yagoda as head of the Council of People’s Commissars, Tukhachevsky as defense commissar, Bukharin as general secretary of the party. (One wonders what went through the minds of those present at official discussions of such a prospect.) Their palace coup, on behalf of foreign powers, was said to involve Pauker, assisted by former Kremlin commandant Rudolf Peterson (sacked back in the Yenukidze affair), who were collectively going to help cut the Kremlin lights and toss grenades into the special cinema during a politburo viewing. (Another variant had them smushing poison onto Kremlin telephone receivers.)123 Voroshilov was not going to defend the manifestly more talented Tukhachevsky, whom he despised, against Stalin’s machinations, but what the defense commissar might not have fully understood was how indulging Tukhachevsky’s annihilation could break open the bloodgates on the beloved army he was trying to protect.124
POPULAR FRONT ON THE RIGHT, CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT
No general war had broken out over Spain because none of the major powers wanted one. Spain might have been the world’s great cause, on one side or the other, but it was no outside country’s principal concern. The global morality play, in fact, was deceiving. “I know that there are some people who believe that as the outcome of this civil war Spain inevitably must have a government either fascist or Communist,” Anthony Eden, then Britain’s foreign secretary, had told a Foreign Press Association dinner in early 1937. “That is not our belief. On the contrary, we believe that neither of these forms of government being indigenous to Spain, neither is likely to endure. Spain will in time evolve her own Spanish form of government.” These self-serving remarks had a certain prescience.125
Nor were the often lurid rumors accurate. Nationalist agents had learned and leaked word of the Spanish Republic gold transfer to the “Reds” in Moscow, provoking an international scandal, as well as a steep drop in the peseta’s value, which raised the costs of imports, but the holdings in Moscow were being used to pay down the Republic’s imports of expensive weaponry.126 Moscow gouged the Spaniards on the prices charged for some weapons (and charged for shipment). Even as the ruble held steady against the dollar, at 5.3 to $1, in transactions with Spain the Soviets converted the ruble at anywhere from 2.0 to 3.95 to $1, after which they then made the conversion of the ruble prices into pesetas; the Spaniards never saw the original ruble conversion rate. This chicanery probably added at least 25 percent to the prices Spain paid for Soviet weaponry. Still, the value of the Soviet weapons delivered did reach a substantial approximation of the value of gold the Soviets took in.127
Hitler, following Franco’s failure to capture Madrid, had decided neither to increase nor to decrease his circumscribed commitment, but Mussolini had expanded the already expansive Italian contribution, thereby perhaps helping to prevent a Nationalist collapse. In February 1937, when Italy had nearly 50,000 troops on the ground in Spain, Mussolini had also dispatched Roberto Farinacci as a personal envoy. Farinacci tried to talk Franco into creating a fascist-style monopoly party and perhaps name a House of Savoy prince as king of Spain. But the more Farinacci saw, the more he was put off by the infighting and corruption. He judged Franco to be “timid,” and characterized his massacres of political prisoners as “politically senseless.” The Nationalists’ secret police overheard Farinacci concluding that Mussolini would have to take over Spain and appoint him as proconsul.128 Franco did adopt the slogan “Una Patria, Un Estado, Un Caudillo” (evoking “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer”), but there would be no Spanish fascist regime. When King Vittorio Emanuele had made Mussolini prime minister, back in 1922, the Italian fascist party counted 320,000 members, ten times the number of Spanish Falangists in 1936. Spain’s homegrown fascists would lose 60 percent of this not very robust membership in civil war combat.129