Dimitrov’s obedience did not save the Comintern from Stalin’s suspicions. Scores of functionaries in its Executive Committee as well as its various departments were executed. No exemption was given to emissaries serving in Spain who were loyally slaughtering the POUM. Stalin and Yezhov tricked many of them back from Madrid and had them killed. Stalin was blunt to Dimitrov, raging that ‘all of you in the Comintern are hand in glove with the enemy’.5 In Moscow he could carry out the purge he desired. Abroad he got Dimitrov to compel the freely operating communist parties — few though they had become — in France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the USA — to expel members who refused to support the official line or who had sympathised with Stalin’s opponents in the past. This punitive atmosphere pervaded the worldwide communist movement. Stalin wanted only such support abroad as was unmistakably loyal.
As the Republicans went down to defeat in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s interest reverted to the French Communist Party and its policy toward Léon Blum’s socialist government. French communist leader Maurice Thorez, like his counterparts elsewhere in Europe, had been wary of the turn towards the popular front; but, having accepted it, he proposed to join Blum’s cabinet in 1936. Permission had to be sought in Moscow. When Moscow demurred, Thorez obeyed Moscow.6 Always the Kremlin kept tight tutelage and Stalin was in command. The chief restriction on his manoeuvres was the quality of information reaching him from the Executive Committee of the Comintern as well as from France and other countries; and leaders such as Thorez, much as they strove to please Stalin, draped their messages in the cloth of their political preferences. Stalin had confidence in the system of decision-making he had established. He also functioned according to his general assumptions about global developments. While recognising the importance of international relations, he could not afford to spend most of his time on them if he was to secure the kind of internal transformation he sought — and in the late 1930s the carrying through of the bloody mass purges remained his first priority. Only an extraordinarily decisive Leader could operate as he did on the European and Asian political stage.
This was obvious in his intervention in the affairs of the Chinese Communist Party. Stalin continued to demand that Mao Tse-tung maintain the alliance with Chiang Kai-shek. Although Mao thought that Stalin overrated the Chinese nationalist movement — the Kuomintang — led by Chiang Kai-shek, he sorely needed financial and political assistance from Moscow. ‘United front’ tactics were demanded by Stalin, and Mao had to accede. Since being suppressed by the Kuomintang in 1927, the Chinese Communist Party had regrouped. The Long March had been undertaken in 1934 to the north of China, where Mao consolidated the party’s support in the villages. The Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party remained intensely hostile to each other. Mutual suspicion spilled over into sporadic violence. Civil war was prevented only by the external threat posed by militarist Japan. The Japanese, who had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and set up the Manchukuo puppet state, plainly contemplated further territorial expansion. To Stalin, who as usual thought in broad geopolitical categories and desired to enhance the immediate security of the USSR, it seemed best for Mao and Chiang to put aside their rivalry; this was the advice supplied by the Comintern to the Chinese communists throughout the mid-1930s.
Mao continued to wriggle away from the Comintern line. No foreign communist party leader before the Second World War displayed such contumacy (as Stalin regarded it). Mao’s men hated the policy of alliance with Chiang and wanted to free themselves from it as soon as they could. Yet when Chiang was captured by an independent Chinese warlord, they found themselves compelled to send Zhou Enlai to secure his release. They had to do this or else face losing crucial military supplies from the USSR. Communist discipline had prevailed.7
