Stalin полностью

Semyon Krivoshein, the tank commander in Spain, had written to Voroshilov urging that the Spanish Communists be allowed to seize power, in order to prosecute the war effectively. “Revolutionary Spain needs a strong government that is able to organize and guarantee the victory of the revolution,” he stressed. “The Communist party ought to come to power even by force, if necessary.” Voroshilov had passed Krivoshein’s report to Stalin on March 10, 1937.¹⁷⁰ But on March 14, in the Little Corner, Stalin met with Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Dimitrov, André Marty, and Togliatti and again expressed support for the Socialist trade unionist Largo Caballero as prime minister. The despot did agree it was best to have Largo Caballero relinquish the war minister portfolio.¹⁷¹ Voroshilov wrote to Berzin and Gaikis on March 15, that, to overcome the tensions between the Spanish Socialists and Communists, Moscow would not object to a merger of the two in a united Socialist Workers’ Party. The next day, Voroshilov instructed Berzin and Stern that the Pravda journalist Koltsov was to refrain from mocking Mussolini, so as not to provoke expanded Italian involvement in the war.¹⁷² Dimitrov, for his part, had been imploring Stalin for another meeting before Marty left Moscow for Spain on March 16, and, that day, the Comintern chief, Togliatti, and Marty were received, along with the cronies, at the Near Dacha, “until 2:30 in the morning.” Stalin cracked wise at Dimitrov’s expense, unnerving him. The despot would not budge on the matter of Communist revolution in Spain.¹⁷³

A Communist takeover had become entirely realistic. By spring 1937, Spain’s Communist party—long one of Europe’s smallest—reached 250,000 members, on its way to perhaps 400,000.¹⁷⁴ (French Communist party membership peaked at 330,000 in 1937; the British Communist party numbered fewer than 20,000.) Spain’s Communists, moreover, were a fighting force: perhaps 130,000 of the 360,000 troops in the Republic’s People’s Army were Communists.¹⁷⁵ The entire POUM may have been 60,000 members, the anarchist groups 100,000, and the Socialist party 160,000. Civil war had made the Communists Republic Spain’s dominant force. Indeed, Largo Caballero, a courageous if vain man, regretted this ever-growing influence of the Spanish Communists and of Moscow, and during the early-winter months of 1937 and into the spring, he floated versions of a war settlement through the Spanish ambassador in Paris. France would obtain the part of Morocco it did not control, Germany would be offered mines and other economic concessions, and Italy a naval base on Menorca, while the Soviets would be forced out.¹⁷⁶ Stalin would likely have known of such a proposal. He told Dimitrov that “if there is a decision for foreign forces to leave Spain, the International Brigades are to be disbanded.”¹⁷⁷

Stalin was reading his briefs closely, writing to Voroshilov (April 13, 1937) that Berzin, in Spain, “is mistaken in his assessment of the failed offensive of the blues [Republic forces] in the area of Casa de Campo [west of Madrid]. The cause of the failure above all consists in the circumstance that when the blues attacked Casa de Campo, the blue troops at Jarama [east of Madrid] remained silent, not even undertaking demonstration acts and giving the whites [Nationalists] the opportunity to throw in their reserves from Jarama against the blues in Casa de Campo. The blue troops are making analogous tactical mistakes constantly.”¹⁷⁸ Right or wrong, it was a battlefield analysis not reliant on invocations of treason and conspiracy.

Franco had felt constrained to abandon, for now, the attempt to capture Madrid, but forces under Mola were being massed to conquer Spain’s Basque country. On April 26, 1937, the German Condor Legion, assisted by Italian aircraft, attacked Guernica, the ancient capital of the Basques, at the behest of the Nationalists, aiming to sow terror in the Republic’s rear. The attack came on a Monday, market day. Not only was the civilian population of some 5,000 to 7,000 (including refugees) carpet-bombed, but as they tried to escape, they were strafed with machine guns mounted on Heinkel He-51s. Hundreds were killed. George Steer, a British journalist in the vicinity, stirred worldwide anger over the atrocities and German culpability with firsthand reportage (Times, April 28, 1937), which was reprinted in France. Nationalists muddied the waters, introducing the lie, propagated by British friends of Franco, that the Basques had blown up their own symbolic capital to discredit Nationalist forces.¹⁷⁹