The Civil War had by then turned decisively in Franco’s favour. By March 1939 it was over. The Republicans had lost the protracted struggle against reactionary forces backed by German and Italian fascism. Stalin’s policy was criticised by Trotski as excessively cautious. For Trotski, the Spanish Civil War offered one of those regular opportunities to spread revolution west of the USSR and to undermine the political far right across Europe. Stalin, though, was mindful of the risks he would run with any strong intervention. Always he dreaded thrusting the French and British governments into the arms of General Franco. Too obvious a communist hegemony over the Spanish government coalition might easily have brought this about. But he and the Comintern at least did something, and it is hardly likely that the Republicans would have held out so long if he had not sanctioned the Spanish Communist Party’s participation. His Trotskyist critics accused him of excessive pragmatism in his management of Soviet foreign policy. They ignored the limited resources available to the USSR. Economically, militarily and — above all — geographically there was no serious chance for him to do more than he achieved at the time.
If he could not have done much more to help, however, he could certainly have done less to hinder. His behaviour towards the Spanish political left, especially in the suppression of the POUM, rightly earned him the opprobrium of George Orwell in
Domestic politics, state security and foreign policy were knotted together in the late 1930s. Stalin arrested hundreds of thousands of harmless Soviet citizens who were of an awkward national ancestry. Poles, Finns, Chinese and Koreans resident in border areas next to the states of their co-nationals were routinely deported to other distant regions of the USSR. Even the Greeks living in the Soviet republics by the Black Sea, hundreds of maritime miles from Greece, suffered this fate.1 Soviet state security policy had a national and ethnic dimension. While promoting the press and schooling for non-Russians in the Soviet multinational state, Stalin showed an intense hostility to some among them. What has become known as ethnic cleansing was not new to the USSR. The Politburo had practised such a policy against Cossacks in the north Caucasus at the end of the Civil War.2 Proposals for cleansing on the basis of nationality resurfaced at the start of the Five-Year Plan.3 But Stalin’s deportations, arrests and executions during and after the Great Terror mounted to a higher scale of national and ethnic repression.
The application of this policy did not exclude card-carrying communists in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s zeal to make the country safe from subversion from abroad went to the point of the extermination of the Communist Party of Poland exiles in Moscow. Polish communists were especially suspect to him. Several of their leaders had sympathised with Soviet internal oppositions in the 1920s. Earlier still, many of them had sided with the Polish Marxist leader and theorist Rosa Luxemburg against Lenin before the Great War. Stalin had anyway always fretted about the menace posed by Poland to the USSR. He was easily convinced by reports from Yezhov’s NKVD that the Polish exile community had been infiltrated by the intelligence agencies of the Western capitalist powers. Stalin was in no mind in November 1937 to treat people on an individual basis: he demanded the entire party’s dissolution. Dimitrov, himself a Bulgarian exile in Moscow, docilely complied and wrote to Stalin for procedural advice. Stalin replied with the blunt demand that Dimitrov should show a sense of urgency: ‘The dissolution is about two years late.’4 Already several Polish communist leaders were in the Lubyanka. The NKVD swiftly picked up the remainder, and most of the prisoners were shot.
