326. Stalin was told on July 26, 1937, that the USSR had dispatched 460,000 tons of goods to Spain since Aug. 1936, from food, oil, and timber to trucks, tractors, ammonium sulfate, cotton, and cigarettes. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 260–4 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 224, l. 95–102). By Feb.–March 1938, the Spanish gold had been spent; Moscow extended a credit of $70 million to the Republic for further purchases. The loans, which might have reached $155 million, were never repaid. Kowalsky reasoned that “even if we subtract Howson’s $51 million in overcharges, acknowledge only the unpaid loan of $70 million, (rather than the potential $155 million), and subtract the cost of three DC-3s (roughly $360,000), the total value of the Soviet assistance provided to the Republic comes to approximately $525 million, or $7 million more than their gold should have bought.” Kowalsky, Stalin, paragraph 548. Politburo agenda items on Spain more and more took up resettling Spanish orphans in the USSR, as well as prisoner exchanges with Italy and Germany.
327. Antonov-Ovseyenko would be summoned to Moscow “for a short period to report” on July 24, 1937. Three days later he would write to Stalin asking to be received. Stalin would grant an audience only on Sept. 14 (first alone, then in the company of Yezhov and Molotov), when Antonov-Ovseyenko would be appointed justice commissar for the RSFSR. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 265 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 224, l. 106); Na prieme, 220. In Spain, management of Soviet diplomacy would fall to Tateos Mandalyan (b. 1901), an ethnic Armenian who went by the name Sergei Marchenko. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 418–9 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 228, l. 1–3).
328. On May 20, 1937, Pascua asked to see Stalin regarding the fall of Largo Caballero and the formation of a new Spanish coalition government. Pascua was worried (as he told Potyomkin) that he had committed errors that put him in Stalin’s bad graces; Stalin assented to an audience—on Aug. 2, after Potyomkin reminded Stalin of Pascua’s request on July 27. Kudriashov, SSSR i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 239 (APRF, f. 3, op. 65, d. 224, l. 18), 265 (105); Na prieme, 217.
329. Through summer 1938, Dimitrov and the Comintern continued to be preoccupied with Spain, sending many long reports to Stalin, but the dictator’s engagement with Spain was essentially finished. Already in Sept.–Oct. 1937, the majority of Soviet advisers were withdrawn from Spain; the Comintern group there was disbanded. Novikov, SSSR, Komintern, II: 78. By Sept. 1938, the Soviets issued an order to withdraw the International brigades (Franco did not reciprocate by sending the Germans and Italians home).
330. The transfer east was formalized on May 11. Already on June 19, Yezhov ordered Balytsky to report to Moscow. Balytsky had to understand this meant his own arrest. Still, perhaps Balytsky imagined he could persuade the dictator of his loyalty, claiming, for example, that even though he and the enemy Yakir had worked together in Ukraine, he had not known of Yakir’s plotting. Khaustov and Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD, 127, citing APRF, f. 3, op. 58, d. 33, l. 81–5. At one time thought to be a candidate to replace Yagoda, Balytsky was executed on Nov. 21, 1937, at Kommunarka, Yagoda’s former dacha. “O sud’be chlenov i kandidatov v chleny TsK VKP (b), izbrannogo XVII s”ezdom partii,” 88.
331. Fröhlich, Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, IV: 214 (July 10, 1937). Erich Wollenberg, a German Communist who served fifteen years in the Red Army (1921–36), noted, “One cannot deny that as a result of the executions the Red Army is leaderless.” Hitler, too, would use this phrase. Wollenberg, Red Army.
CHAPTER 8. “WHAT WENT ON IN NO. 1’S BRAIN?”
1. “Secret Speech” [1956], in Khruschev, Khrushchev Remembers, 616.
2. Chuev, Molotov Remembers, 263.
3. Solzhenitsyn, without access to regime archives, got this right, writing that “old prisoners claim to remember that the first blow allegedly took the form of mass arrests” in Aug. 1937. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, I: 68. See also Weissberg-Cybulski, Accused, 7–10.
