Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (66 page)

Caballero, who became Prime Minister in September 1936, though foolish and easily deceived, gave some resistance to the Stalinist take-over. He refused to allow the Communists to absorb the Socialist Party, as had happened in the youth movement, and in January 1937, having received a menacing letter from Stalin, and a demand to sack his best general, he threw the Soviet ambassador, Marcel Rosenberg, out of his office with the words ‘Out you go! Out!’ and in a voice so loud it could be heard outside. Spain might be poor, he said, but it would not tolerate that ‘a foreign ambassador should try and impose his will on the head of the Spanish government’.
⁸²
That was the end of Caballero (it was the end of Rosenberg too, who was immediately recalled and murdered by Stalin), though it took some time for the Soviet authorities to arrange a
coup.
It was decided at a meeting of the
CP
executive attended by the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Marty, Orlov and other secret police officials. It is notable that the
CP
Secretary-General, José Diaz, opposed ousting Caballero on Stalin’s instruction, and at one point shouted at Marty, ‘You are a guest at meetings of the Spanish Communist Party. If our proceedings do not please you, there is the door!’ But in the shouting and the vote that followed, only Diaz and Jesús Hernández, the Minister of Education and our source for this meeting, voted against the
coup;
the other Spanish Communists were terrified of Orlov’s men.
⁸³

Caballero’s successor, Juan Negrín, had been picked by Stalin’s agent, Arthur Stashevsky, the previous November, as the ideal puppet: a non-political, upper middle-class professor, with no union or working-class following, no Communist affiliations, and therefore ‘respectable’ in the eyes of the foreign press, with gross personal habits, and therefore easily blackmailed. Instead of making arms purchases, he would drive across France in a fast sports-car chasing girls. His greed was spectacular: sometimes he would dine three times in a single evening. To his protest that he was not popular enough to be premier, Hernández cynically replied, ‘Popularity can be created’ – propaganda was the one activity in which the Communists were without rival.
⁸⁴
Behind Negrín’s complaisant ignorance, the Communists – that is, Stalin’s secret police – took over Republican Spain. The result was one of the major political tragedies of the century.

It is clear that, if the army had not staged a
putsch
in July 1936, sooner or later Spain would have had to endure a civil war fought among the Left. It broke out in Barcelona in the spring of 1937, with
the Communists fighting the
POUM
and the anarchists. The immediate pretext, as in the wider civil war, was a political murder, of a leading Communist, Roldán Cortada, shot on 25 April, possibly by an anarchist ‘control patrol’, possibly by the Comintern agent Ernö Gerö. Both sides had private armies, secret police forces, gangs of murderous thugs. The
POUM
slogan was ‘Before renouncing the revolution, we will die on the barricades’. The Communist chanted ‘Before we capture Saragossa, we have to take Barcelona’. There were riots and large-scale fighting in May, followed by the intervention of the navy and 4,000 assault guards.
⁸⁵
Caballero’s refusal to disband the
POUM
militias was the immediate pretext for his ousting. The moment Negrín was installed as nominal premier, the Communists took over the Interior Ministry and all the key police and paramilitary posts, and moved forward to a
règlement des comptes.

The purge coincided with Stalin’s massacre of his own party in Russia, and it bore all the marks of his methods. The
CP
-controlled Madrid police forced two captured Falangists to prepare a fake plan for a Madrid rising by Franco’s much-vaunted ‘Fifth Column’, and they forged a letter to Franco, on the back of this plan, from Andrés Nin, the
POUM
leader. A great mass of forged documents implicating the
POUM
in a fascist betrayal was put in a suitcase left in Gerona, then ‘discovered’ by police. On 14 June, Orlov, as head of the Spanish
NKVD
, probably acting on direct instructions from Stalin, ordered the arrest of all
POUM
leaders. This was despite the protests of the Communist members of the cabinet (the non-Communist members, least of all Negrín, were not even informed).
⁸⁶
The Commander of the 29th
POUM
division was recalled from the front for ‘consultations’ and arrested too. The detained men were taken straight to carefully prepared interrogation-centres and torture-chambers, most of them underground but including the former Barcelona convent of St Ursula, known as ‘the Dachau of Republican Spain’. Efforts by the cabinet to secure Nin’s release were quite unavailing. But Stalin’s plans to make him the centre of a Spanish show-trial were frustrated, since Nin, the model for Orwell’s hero Goldstein in
Nineteen Eighty-four
, preferred to die under torture rather than confess. (He was eventually murdered by Orlov in the park of El Pardo, later Franco’s palace.) During the rest of 1937 and well into 1938, many thousands of
POUM
members, and indeed other Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons. They included a large number of foreigners, such as Trotsky’s former secretary, Erwin Wolff, the Austrian socialist Kurt Landau, the British journalist ‘Bob’ Smilie and a former lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, José Robles.
Among those who just managed to escape were Orwell and Willy Brandt, the future German Chancellor.
⁸⁷

It was one of Spain’s many misfortunes at this time that her Civil War coincided with the climax of Stalin’s great terror. Many of the Barcelona murders had little to do with Spain’s internal politics but were, rather, the backlash of events in Moscow and Leningrad. Thus Robles was executed because, as interpreter of General Jan Antonovich Berzin, head of the Russian military mission to Spain, he knew too much about Berzin’s recall and liquidation as part of Stalin’s purge of the army. Stalin was having his leading agents killed all over the world in 1937–8. And, as in Russia, virtually all the creatures who helped him to take over the Left in Spain, and then to terrorize it, were murdered in turn. The head of the
NKVD’S
foreign department was cornered in his own office in Paris in February 1938 and forced to take cyanide. Of those who organized arms supplies to Spain, Evhen Konovalek was killed in Rotterdam in May 1938, Rudolf Clement was found, a headless corpse, in the Seine, and Walter Krivitsky, boss of Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe, was chased for three years by Stalin’s hit-men until they got him in Washington on 10 February 1941.
⁸⁸
In addition to General Berzin, Stalin murdered Michael Koltzov, the famous
Pravda
Spanish correspondent, Arthur Stashevky, head of the economic mission to Spain, and Antonov Ovseenko, Consul-General in Barcelona, who was told he was being recalled to Moscow to be made Minister of Justice, a joke characteristic of Stalin’s gallows-humour.
⁸⁹
The only man who escaped Stalin was the arch-killer Orlov himself, who defected, wrote an account of all he knew, informed Stalin that he had arranged to have it published immediately if he died violently, and so was left in peace, publishing his tale after Stalin’s death.
⁹⁰

It may be asked: how was it that the atrocities against the Left in Barcelona did not cause a wave of revulsion against Stalinism throughout the world? One factor was luck. On 26 April 1937, the day after Cortada’s murder in Barcelona detonated the internal crisis, forty-three aircraft of the Condor Legion bombed the historic Basque town of Guernica, whose famous oak tree had shaded the first Basque parliament. About 1,000 people were killed and 70 per cent of the buildings destroyed. It was not the first bombing of a town by either side, and Guernica was a legitimate target, though the object of the raid was terror. It was decided upon by Colonel Wolfgang von Richthofen, the Legion’s Commander, in consultation with Colonel Juan Vigón, Mola’s Chief of Staff. There is no evidence Mola knew about it beforehand; Franco certainly did not; and the Germans did not know of the town’s historical significance.
⁹¹
For the Comintern propagandists – the best in the world – it was a stroke
of uncovenanted fortune, and they turned it into the most celebrated episode of the entire war. Picasso, who had already been asked to do a large painting for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Fair, leapt at the subject, and the result was later taken to the New York Metropolitan. Guernica helped to push a whole segment of Western opinion, including the magazines
Time
and
Newsweek
, over to the Republican side.
⁹²
In the subsequent hullabaloo, the echoes of which could still be heard in the 1980s, when the painting was solemnly hung in the Prado, the sounds of mass-slaughter in Barcelona went unheard.

The way in which Guernica was used to screen the destruction of the
POUM
was typical of the brilliancy of Comintern propaganda, handled by two inspired professional liars, Willi Muenzenberg and Otto Katz, both later murdered on Stalin’s orders.
⁹³
Throughout the Spanish war, Stalinism was assisted not only by superb public relations but by the naivety, gullibility and, it must also be said, the mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals, especially their willingness to overlook what W.H.Auden called ‘the necessary murder’. When Orwell escaped and sought to publish an account of the
POUM
scandal, ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, in the
New Statesman
, its editor, Kingsley Martin, turned it down on the grounds that it would damage Western support for the Republican cause; he later argued that Negrín would have broken with the Communists over the
POUM
affair if the West had been willing to supply him with arms. But when Orwell’s exposure appeared in the
New English Weekly
, it attracted little notice.
⁹⁴
The intellectuals of the Left did not want to know the objective truth; they were unwilling for their illusions to be shattered. They were overwhelmed by the glamour and excitement of the cause and few had the gritty determination of Orwell to uphold absolute standards of morality, or the experience of the horrors that occurred when relative ones took their place. Many of them treated ‘the Party’ with abject subservience. Thus the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who joined it in 1936, apologized for not having done so before, priggishly confessing to a ‘refinement of bourgeois subjectivism by which I was unwilling to join the party till I was making enough money to be able to assure myself that I was joining from disinterested motives, not as one of the lean and hungry who would personally profit by revolution.’ He felt he had to ask the Party’s permission even before he accepted an invitation to join the selection committee of the Book Society.
⁹⁵

Besides, the Communists controlled access to Republican Spain. To get there a British writer, for instance, needed a letter from the head of the
CP
,
Harry Pollitt, who worked closely with Victor Gollancz, the leading left-wing publisher, whose Left Book Club dominated the
market. The poet W.H. Auden was saved by his ‘Pollitt letter’ from a prison sentence when he was arrested for indecency in a Barcelona Park.
⁹⁶
A visit to ‘our’ Spain was essential to the self-respect of a progressive intellectual. Just as the Germans, Russians and Italians used Spain to test their new military equipment – exploitation by hardware – so writers went there to acquire material for their next novel or poem, what might be termed exploitation by software. André Malraux, whose novel about the Chinese revolution,
La Condition humaine
(1932), had made him world famous, went to Spain hoping for a sequel, which duly appeared as
L’Espoir
(1938). He brought with him a squadron of slow Potex bombers, which created a noisy splash in the papers but did little damage to the nationalists, and anyway had to be crewed by Spaniards. The commander of the Republican fighters, Garcia Lacalle, wrote that Malraux’s people were ‘writers, artists, photographers, women, children and I don’t know what – everything but aviators’.
⁹⁷
Hemingway was in Spain too, ‘researching’
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Fancying himself hard-boiled and experienced in the cynicism of war, ‘Papa’ was easily duped. When his friend Dos Passos became worried about the disappearance of Robles, whom he knew well (he had in fact already been murdered), Hemingway was tipped off by his
‘amigo’
in counter-espionage, the sinister Pepe Quintanilla, that Robles was a spy, and at once assumed he was guilty. He attributed Dos Passos’ ‘continued belief in Robles’s loyalty to the good-hearted naivety of a “typical American liberal attitude’” – but of course it was Hemingway who proved naive.
⁹⁸

To keep the intellectuals well-disposed, the Comintern circus-masters staged all-expenses-paid international gatherings. There was the 1937 International Peace Campaign in Brussels, run by the French
CP
leader Marcel Cachin, which invented a Peace Day, a Peace Fair, a Peace Penny and a Peace Oath. Kingsley Martin described it – though not at the time but thirty years later – as ‘the murder of honesty, enthusiasm and faith’ which induced in him ‘desperation’.
⁹⁹
Still worse, the same year, was the Madrid Writers’ Congress. Stephen Spender recorded that he and other guests were ‘treated like princes or ministers … riding in Rolls-Royces, banqueted, feted, sung and danced to’, though the climax of the proceedings was a vicious attack on André Gide, who had just published a critical book on Russia,
Retour de l’URSS
, and was now publicly excoriated as a ‘fascist monster’. A burst of artillery fire restored a sense of reality: