Immediately after the formation of the Negrin Government, the new Director-General of Security, the Communist Colonel Ortega, told Hernández that Orlov, the NKVD chief for Spain, had had him sign a number of warrants for the arrest of POUM leaders, without his superior, the Minister of the Interior, being informed. Orlov himself told Hernéndez that the leaders of POUM would be “exposed” as being in collusion with a group of Franco spies already under arrest.
Hernéndez recounts that the majority of the Spanish Communist leadership, though acting loyally in accordance with the Comintern directives, was disgusted with the whole affair. The Secretary-General, José Díaz (who was later to jump or be pushed from his window in Tbilisi), spoke of “this spiritual death” which had come over him. Togliatti and Dolores Ibarruri (“La Pasionaria”—a Communist who was never to be afflicted with qualms of conscience) had sent the Assault Guards’ Commander in Catalonia an order to arrest the POUM leadership.
On 16 June, Andrés Nin, Political Secretary of POUM and former Secretary of the Red Trade Union International in Moscow, who had held the portfolio of Justice in the Catalan autonomous Government, was arrested. He was taken to Alcala, to a prison in Communist hands. There he was seized by a group of men, including Orlov and Vittorio Vidali (an old Comintern agent later to be involved in the murder of Trotsky, and after the war to lead the anti-Titoite Communists in Trieste). He was removed to El Pardo and there submitted to a Soviet-style investigation. First he was interrogated for thirty hours in relays, without success, and then tortured. “At the end of a few days, his face was no more than a formless mass.”78 However, no confession could be obtained from him, and he seems either to have been killed or to have died under interrogation. El Campesino was told that he was buried on the spot.79
The formation in France of the Committee for the Defense of POUM and, even more, a strong but simple letter demanding merely a fair deal and treatment of the POUM accused, signed by Gide, Mauriac, Duhamel, Roger Martin du Gard, and others, seems to have had an effect in Spain and even on Negr1n. In the case of the senior POUM
Hernéndez takes the view that an important motive of Stalin’s was to show that not only in Russia, but also in a “democratic” country governed by the Popular Front, Trotskyites had been proved traitors. Thus it was a question not simply of pursuing the feud and destroying all Trotskyite bases, but also of obtaining an ostensible non-Soviet confirmation of the existence of Trotskyite plots.
Meanwhile, the vulnerable units of the International Brigade were being combed for Trotskyites. For example, Walter Ulbricht was conducting among the German Brigaders the Spanish end of the purge which was sweeping the German Communists in Moscow. (The seconded Red Army commander “Kleber,” commanding the International Brigade, was removed in February 1937 and soon afterward arrested.) The Soviet soldiers in Spain, who must have resented the NKVD actions, were often shot on return, as we have seen.
Ironically, as Stalin carried out his will as regards purges and control over the political machinery in Spain, he lost interest in the outcome of the actual war. Ehrenburg tells us that though the Soviet authorities expressed great indignation at Fascist and Nazi intervention in Spain, as soon as it became evident that the Republicans were fighting a losing battle, this interest became a mere formality. Ehrenburg’s own dispatches, sometimes sent with considerable risk, were cut, altered, or simply thrown into the wastepaper basket.80
Many Spaniards who managed to escape the final debacle made their way to Moscow-150 in a single boat.81 About 6,000, including 2,000 children, is the figure given.82 They found themselves facing a different danger.
This wave of political refugees of the Left had been preceded by others. After the defeat of the Socialist rising in Vienna in 1934, several hundred members of the Socialist defense organization Schutzbund took refuge in Russia. They were welcomed as heroes, and marched past in a body in the Red Square to applause and congratulations. By mid-1937, they had been arrested and sent to camps “almost without exception.”83 Some of their dependents, with children to feed and no source of income (having been fired from their jobs), went in 1938 to the German Embassy, now controlled by the Nazis, in an attempt to get back to their homes. The Nazis put them up in the Embassy building and escorted them to the Soviet Registration Office for Foreigners to get permission to go back. Apparently, some succeeded.
