Stalin полностью

Soviet annihilation of the POUM also sowed deep disillusionment among those who identified with the antifascist cause of Spain’s Republic. Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, who, before discovering the Lancashire miners in 1936, had been only intermittently interested in politics, had gone to Spain in early 1937 and joined a militia associated with the POUM. “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle,” he would write in Homage to Catalonia. “Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. . . . Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. . . . In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.” But Orwell was shocked to discover that the Communists were fighting tooth and nail against this grassroots revolution. On May 20, 1937, he was shot in the throat by a sniper. With the banning of the POUM, he would flee across the border to France.¹⁹⁹

In Paris, an International Exhibition opened on May 25 that would run for six months. In front of the Eiffel Tower, a neoclassical columned Nazi pavilion designed by Albert Speer and topped by an eagle faced a Soviet pavilion designed by Boris Yofan and topped by a statue designed by Vera Mukhina, of a male worker and a female peasant together thrusting a hammer and sickle. Nearby stood the Spanish pavilion, which, from summer 1937, would showcase Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.²⁰⁰ The besieged Basque country had surrendered.

STALIN’S TUKHACHEVSKY PLOT

Thanks to the endless purges and verifications, the Soviet armed forces counted just 150,000 party members among its 1.4 million men—half the number it had four years earlier. This spurred a move, in May 1937, to reintroduce political commissars and create three-person military soviets in units, to which local nonmilitary party secretaries were added.²⁰¹ But if Stalin was worried about a decline of party influence in the army, he himself was the cause.

Corps commander Primakov, nine months in Lefortovo, had refused to admit his “guilt,” but finally on May 8, 1937, he “confessed” and implicated others.²⁰² On May 10, a politburo decree demoted Tukhachevsky from first deputy defense commissar to commander of the Volga military district. It also named Marshal Alexander Yegorov—Stalin’s crony from the civil war—as the new first deputy commissar, returned Shaposhnikov as chief of the general staff, and shifted Yakir from Kiev to the Leningrad military district.²⁰³ Stalin received Tukhachevsky in the Little Corner on May 13, in the presence of Voroshilov, Molotov, Yezhov, and Kaganovich, and reassured the marshal that everything would be sorted out, mentioning a problem with Tukhachevsky’s lover, Yulia Kuzmina, who supposedly was a foreign agent.²⁰⁴ Around this time, August Kork, head of the Frunze Military Academy, was arrested and beaten into testifying. On May 15, Boris Feldman, head of the Red Army cadres department, was arrested, and, under severe torture, he incriminated Tukhachevsky (who the next day departed for his new posting in the rear, the city of Kuibyshev).²⁰⁵ Yezhov was putting together the pieces in Stalin’s scenario.