The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 полностью

The Soviet military advisers nevertheless continued to exert pressure by saying to any Spanish officer who objected to their plans that they ought to ask their government whether Soviet assistance was still required. Such activity took place despite the statement in Stalin’s letter that Soviet personnel had been ‘categorically ordered [to] keep strictly to the functions of an adviser, and an adviser alone’. After the socialist newspaper Adelante published on 30 April 1937 an article ‘which contained provocative attacks addressed at the USSR and its leaders’, Voroshilov, in a coded telegram, gave orders to the chief adviser, General Stern. ‘Visit Caballero personally and declare, in response to his request for us to send our pilots, etc., to Spain, that considering this disloyal attitude, we not only cannot send them any more of our men, but we will also have to withdraw the men who are in Spain now, unless they disavow this provocative article in Adelante and punish the ones who are guilty for its publication, and unless they apologize to us.’¹²

Largo Caballero’s position was also being eroded from within. He could no longer ignore the fact that his close friend, Álvarez del Vayo, the foreign minister, was an active Party supporter. The communist Enrique Castro described their attitude to the foreign minister when he said in a paraphrase of Lenin that ‘he is a fool, but more or less useful’. Largo Caballero tried to limit Álvarez del Vayo’s control over the appointment of commissars to the army. On 17 April he published a decree placing the corps of commissars directly under his orders.¹³ The communist press exploded in outrage. ‘Who can feel hostile to this corps of heroes?’ it demanded. ‘Who can show themselves to be incompatible with those forging the People’s Army? Only the declared enemies of the people.’¹⁴ Once hailed as ‘the Spanish Lenin’, Largo was now a ‘declared enemy of the people’. La Pasionaria gave a remarkable example of what Orwell later called double-speak. According to her, restricting the commissars would ‘mean leaving our soldiers at the mercy of officers, who could at a moment disfigure the character of our army by returning to the old days of barrack discipline’. Yet the communists were the chief advocates of drill, saluting and privileges for officers.

Caballero’s attempts to prevent communist recruiting drives within the armed services also came to nothing. A Soviet officer reported back to Moscow: ‘As Largo Caballero has banned party work in units, we have taught our friends to carry out their party work under the guise of amateur creative activities. For example, we organized a celebration dinner on the eve of the [1 May] holiday to which representatives of the anti-fascist committee were invited, as well as those from the Party committee, the editorial office of Mundo Obrero, and the best commanders of other units of “friends” (Líster and others).’¹⁵

The communists also set up a police school in Madrid, where students who refused Party membership were failed. The secret police was taken over by NKVD agents in the late autumn of 1936 and it soon became the communists’ most feared weapon. Even Wenceslao Carillo, the director-general of security, found himself powerless against them. Many of the Spaniards who were recruited for this work could hardly be described as ‘anti-fascist’, but they were given Party cards nevertheless. When the first Soviet ambassador, Rosenberg, made his comment about scum always coming to the top in revolutions, he failed to add that much of it was creamed off into the secret police afterwards. Meanwhile, the campaign to win over the paramilitary forces like the Assault Guard was helped by Margarita Nelken, a socialist member of the Cortes and another secret communist. This was the manoeuvre to which General Asensio Torrado had objected, earning the Party’s bitter enmity.