The Soviet general staff documented the foreign reactions. The damage was severe, but Stalin, far from being deterred, was just beginning.320 By contrast, his involvement in Spain had effectively peaked as of May–June 1937. Despite the accusatory exaggerations against both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Stalin, even more than Hitler, had deliberately kept his intervention on the Iberian Peninsula within limits. Altogether, between 1,150 and 1,500 Soviet combat personnel would see duty, including 772 pilots and 351 tank operators, a paltry number compared with the 19,000 Germans, let alone the 80,000 Italians who would fight.321 Another 500 or so Soviet military advisers would also serve, but only 9 Soviet political workers were sent to Spain during the entire war.322 Soviet deaths would be recorded at 125, plus another 43 missing in action.323 German dead would be estimated at 300. Italy would suffer 16,650 dead, wounded, and missing in action and would expend at least 6.1 billion lira supporting Franco.324 (The economic advantages anticipated for Italian support fell largely to Germany.)325 Stalin’s expenses would be significant (in the form of loans that would not be repaid) but contained.326 Especially with the “Trotskyite” POUM crushed by spring–summer 1937, Stalin appears to have lost much of his interest.327 After summer 1937, little new Soviet equipment would be sent or upgrades made, while Soviet pilots and tank crews would be withdrawn, diplomatic ties downgraded, and the heady cultural exchanges terminated.328
Propaganda on Spain did not disappear, but in Soviet newsreels, China gained ascendancy.329 On this front as well, Stalin was annihilating his officers. NKVD bigwig Vsevolod Balytsky had been transferred from Ukraine to fabricate a Trotskyite-fascist conspiracy in the Soviet Far Eastern Army, the country’s critical line of defense against Japan; within a few weeks, on July 7, 1937, Balytsky himself was arrested as a Polish agent. He had been in Stalin’s Little Corner more than twenty times in the 1930s. En route eastward, at a Siberian train station, he had unburdened himself of complaints about the terror to a fellow Chekist, who promptly denounced him to Yezhov. The assignment of eviscerating the Soviet Far Eastern Army fell to another butcher.330 On the country’s southern border, Georgia’s Beria reported to Stalin (July 9) that he had uncovered his own “military conspiracy” in the South Caucasus military district. The next day, Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary that Hitler judged Stalin “likely diseased in the brain. Otherwise one cannot explain his bloody rule.”331
CHAPTER 8“WHAT WENT ON IN NO. 1’S BRAIN?”
We cannot say that these were the deeds of a giddy despot. He considered that this should be done in the interest of the party, of the working masses, in the name of the defense of the revolution’s gains. In this lies the whole tragedy!
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV1
Stalin thought very highly of Bukharin. Yes, he did. Bukharin was very educated and cultivated. But what should one do?
VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV2
HAD STALIN AIMED ONLY TO BREAK HIS INNER CIRCLE, utterly cow the wider elite, and make himself a despot, he might have ended the terror with the in-camera trial and executions of the military men and the arrests of Yagoda, Pauker, and other NKVD higher-ups. Mission accomplished. But he had much larger aims, with plans for more high-profile trials. In summer 1937, he vastly expanded the arrests and executions to nonelites. There was no “dynamic” forcing him to do so, no “factional” fighting, no heightened threat abroad. The terror was not spiraling out of his control. He just decided, himself, to approve quota-driven eradication of entire categories of people in a