In Moscow the time had come for a decision on whether or not to intervene as Hitler and Mussolini had already done. Deployment of Red military units was not feasible at such a distance. But the revolutionary tradition impelled Stalin to look favourably on the request from Madrid for help. So too did the awareness that if no resistance to German assertiveness were shown, Europe as a whole would be exposed to the expansionist aims of the Third Reich. Failure to act would be taken as a sign that the policy of the popular front had no substance. Finance and munitions were dispatched by boat to Spain from Leningrad. Simultaneously the Communist International sent the Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti under the alias Ercoli to direct the activities of the Spanish communists. Togliatti and his fellow political and military emissaries found a chaotic scene. At Stalin’s command they sought to turn the Spanish Communist Party into the leading force on the left without actually entering the government coalition. The policy of the popular front was maintained and Moscow frowned on all talk of a communist seizure of power. Dimitrov came into his own by leading the implementation of the general line agreed in the Kremlin: he knew it was not safe to ignore his master’s voice.14
As the Republic’s armed forces were pushed on to the retreat by Franco, the Spanish government pressed for the communists to enter the coalition. Stalin had to be phoned for consent and then Dimitrov sent the tactical instructions to communist leader José Diaz. Eventually the socialist party chief Largo Caballero emerged as head of government. By March 1937 Stalin had become distinctly edgy about being drawn into a military struggle of internal significance without being able to control the consequences, and reports about the effectiveness of the coalition and its army were not encouraging. His instinct was to pull out of Spain and disband the International Brigades in the event that Germany and Italy were also to withdraw; but for the moment he insisted on a merger of the communist and socialist parties in Spain.15 This immediately became Comintern policy. Yet the inter-party negotiations in Spain made little progress: years of mutual antagonism could not be discounted overnight. Nor did Stalin help the situation by deploying NKVD agents to seek out and liquidate Spanish Trotskyists. Distrust on the political left grew rapidly as members of the POUM, loyal to Trotski’s ideas, were rounded up. Remorselessly the Spanish Communist Party reinforced its influence in the government.
The situation changed from month to month and the socialists refused to do the bidding of the Spanish Communist Party. By February 1938 Stalin had concluded that the communists should resign from the government. Dimitrov in Moscow and Togliatti in Spain complied with the decision despite the disarray it was bound to cause in the anti-Franco alliance.16 The political tensions on the left were not concocted out of nothing by Stalin. But he made them murderously worse than they need have been; and if anyone thought that his accusations against internal victims in the USSR were merely an instrument of despotism without genuine importance for him, they were disillusioned by events in Spain. Exactly the same political persecutions were put in train. Stalin was determined that the far-left elements on the Republican side should be liquidated before they could infect the Spanish Communist Party with their diseased purposes. Of course there were plenty of leftists in Spain who by their own profession were Trotskyists, anarchists or independent communists. Stalin had no need to ponder the options: he knew he had to cauterise the wound of far-left pluralism. Spain was going to be helped on the terms of his political homicidalism.
