The Spanish Civil War (50 page)

These deliveries of men and materials were not made by Russia as a friendly contribution to the revolutionary cause. They had to be paid for. This was done by the shipment to Russia of most of the gold which hitherto had guaranteed the Spanish currency, Spain’s most valuable treasure. Spain had then the fourth highest gold reserve in the world. Some of this monetary gold had been sent to Paris to guarantee delivery of goods before the war, some in July. But most lay in the vaults of
the Bank of Spain in Madrid.
¹
Much of it was in coin—Louis d’or, sovereigns, dollars, as well as gold pesetas. In September, it had seemed desirable for the republic to remove this treasure ‘to a safe place’. On 13 September, the cabinet gave authority to the new Prime Minister and finance minister, Largo Caballero and Negrín, to ensure this. The assumption apparently was that the gold would be taken somewhere in Spain; and it was taken by train to a large, well-guarded cave near Cartagena. Largo Caballero and Negrín, together with the latter’s civil service under-secretary, Méndez Aspe, soon decided that Russia was the safest place. Russia leapt at the idea, and Stalin’s chief secret policeman in Spain, Orlov, was apparently placed in charge of getting it to Russia. Britain and France, the most logical places for the gold reserve, were the staunchest proponents of non-intervention, and it seemed risky to take the gold there.
²
It was not only the ‘fascists’ of whom Largo Caballero was afraid: Durruti had a plan to raid the Bank of Spain in early October, though he was talked out of it by Abad de Santillán.
³
Nevertheless, Largo Caballero and Negrín apparently told neither the President, Azaña, nor any other minister of their new plans. Azaña was, understandably, furious when he was told that the gold had left Spain; and Prieto wished to resign in protest, being dissuaded by Azaña from an action with which he himself sympathized.
⁴

Negrín shipped the gold to Russia on 25 October. It became a kind of ‘current account’, in Largo’s words, on which the republic could draw to pay for their arms supplies and other purchases, including oil, from both Russia and elsewhere. Spanish wine, sugar and fruit, with
some other goods, also helped the republic’s balance in Russia. The details were arranged between Negrín and the Russian economic attaché, Stashevsky.
¹

This faery gold, as it later appeared to be, left for Russia in large boxes, being loaded onto four Russian steamers by sixty sailors who worked for three nights, while, during the day, they slept on the boxes containing it. The sailors were provided by the commander of the base at Cartagena, Captain Ramírez de Togores, without being told what they were doing. When the loading was finished, the under-secretary, Méndez Aspe, compared figures with Orlov. Orlov’s figure was 7,900 boxes, Méndez Aspe’s 7,800. The error was two lorry-loads, since each lorry had contained fifty boxes. Orlov did not tell Méndez Aspe of this divergence, since, if his count should prove to be correct, he might have had to be responsible for the lost boxes.
²
The Russian ships were guarded by the republican fleet as far as Algiers.
³
The arrival of the gold, or some of it, was seen by the German consul at Odessa who, on 6 November, noted the arrival of a grey ship of 4,000 tons, its name made illegible, which lay in Odessa roadstead without a flag, and which was unloaded at night.
⁴
When the gold reached Moscow, the counting was made to last indefinitely—so that the four Spanish officials accompanying it remained in Russia as long as possible.
⁵
When their families in Spain grew anxious, they were sent to Russia also. They were not allowed to go free till 1938. Marcelino Pascua, the Spanish ambassador in Moscow, a socialist, doctor by profession and until now director-general of health, could do nothing for these unfortunate officials.
⁶
They were doubtless lucky not to have been turned to stone, as usually happens to human beings who enter the kingdom of giants. Eventually, they were allowed to go free—one being shipped to Stockholm, one to Washington, one to Buenos Aires. According to Orlov, Stalin celebrated the arrival of the gold with a banquet at which he announced, ‘The
Spaniards will never see their gold again, just as one cannot see one’s own ears’,
¹
even though the official receipt said the Spanish republican government could re-export the gold when they liked.
²

Meanwhile, on 21 September, the other part of Russia’s help to Spain was begun when an NKVD agent named Zimin visited Krivitsky in The Hague, and a meeting was held in Paris with that official’s colleagues posted in London, Stockholm and Switzerland. Zimin described the supreme importance of keeping Russia’s name from being associated with the Comintern arms traffic. The first move, he said, was to set up an organization for the purchase of arms throughout Europe. Krivitsky, who was himself wondering at this time whether he could break away from his Soviet service, arranged the financial capital and the offices, and guaranteed profits.
³
Both he and Ignace Poretsky (Ignace Reiss), the NKVD chief in Switzerland, who worked with him on this matter, hoped obscurely that ‘a victory for the Spanish Revolution would help to overthrow Stalin in Russia’. Agents, at a price, were easily found. These resembled characters in a spy story. There was, for example, a Dr Mylanos, a Greek, established in Gdynia. There was Fuat Baban, another Greek, the representative in Turkey of the Škoda, Schneider, and Hotchkiss firms, later arrested in Paris for selling drugs. And there was ‘Ventoura. Of Jewish origin. Born Constantinople. Found guilty of a swindle in Austria. False passport. Lives with a woman in Greece. Domicile in Paris in a hotel in Avenue Friedland’.
⁴
It is such persons as these who must be pictured, during the rest of the Spanish war, carrying out their profitable missions behind the backs of the dignified gentlemen of the Non-Intervention Committee and supplying expensive, sometimes obsolete, weapons to the republican government’s Arms Purchase Commission, with its headquarters in Paris, perhaps through the French communist party, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, or other agents.
⁵

Around this Commission, a horde of unscrupulous profiteers clustered. Many of those involved became, in one way or another, corrupted whether or not they worked for the Comintern. Had the whole question of arms purchase been honourably carried on, many more weapons might have arrived in Spain, whatever happened to non-intervention. But perhaps the private arms traffic inevitably breeds corruption. A chain of import-export firms was nevertheless set up in Paris, London, Prague, Zurich, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Brussels, with an NKVD member as a silent partner controlling funds. Arms were produced from Czechoslovakia, France, Poland, Holland and even Germany; from the latter country, the astute Admiral Canaris even secured the dispatch, through communist hands, of defective war material to the republic.
¹
With the French frontier closed, the best way of transporting the arms was by sea, consular papers being secured from British, Greek, Latin American or Chinese governments, falsely certifying that the goods were for those countries.
²

Meantime, a third element in communist help to the republic began. How precisely it originated is still a little obscure. Willy Muenzenberg, the propaganda chief of the Comintern in western Europe, visited Moscow in September.
³
He supported a suggestion made by Thorez, the secretary-general of the French communist party, that some aid might also go to the republic in the form of volunteers raised internationally by foreign communist parties (though they would welcome non-communists) to add to those already in Spain fighting for
the ‘cause of liberty’. At the end of September, the central committee of the Italian communist party met in Paris in the presence of French communist leaders and of Codovilla, the senior Comintern representative with the Spanish party. They agreed that ‘a column larger than that of Rosselli’ should be organized from Italian anti-fascists to go to Spain.
¹
In a day or two, the Comintern’s executive took the decision to form, under their authority, a number of international columns out of all the many who wanted, or could be persuaded, or be sent, to go to fight for the republic. Luigi Longo, the Italian communist youth leader of some years before, had spent much of August and September in Spain, and he was charged to make the appropriate arrangements with the Spanish government.
²
Dimitrov, the Bulgarian communist who was secretary-general of the Comintern, is also said to have become enthusiastic for this idea.

No doubt, however, the Russian ministry of defence was concerned in the plan from an early stage, for the excellent reason that there was a precedent for this international force in the Red Army, during the Russian Civil War. The designation ‘International Brigade’ had even been used, along with other names such as First International Legion of the Red Army, the International Red Army, and the First Revolutionary International Detachment. Into these forces in support of the revolution in Russia there had been pressed volunteers, or ex–prisoners of war from Austro-Hungarian or German or Bulgarian armies. Many of these men served in the Ukraine under no less a person than Antonov Ovsëenko, in 1936 the Russian consul general in Barcelona. Some of them were even still available in sections of the Russian army. Presumably it seemed convenient to Stalin if an experiment which had been tried out in one civil war might be employed again in another.
³
The Comintern had been concerned after all with armed insurrection in the 1920s and Togliatti, now so closely concerned with events in Spain, had written part of the Comintern’s technical manual on the subject.
⁴

In addition, many Italian, German and other exiles from fascist or right-wing authoritarian régimes, along with others still in those countries, themselves longed for the outbreak of a real war against fascism:
¹
‘We had a greater need of going to Spain than the Spanish republic had need of us’, wrote one Italian exile, Emilio Lussu.
²
‘
Oggi in Spagna, domani in Italia
’ was a famous cry of Rosselli, echoed by many others. Earlier in September, Randolfo Pacciardi, an Italian liberal republican émigré, had approached the Spanish government with the aim of forming an Italian legion in Spain, independent of political parties, to be recruited in Paris. But Largo Caballero opposed the idea.
³
Now, after new disasters on the battlefront, he altered his view. Luigi Longo, the prominent young Italian, Stephan Wisniewski, a Polish communist, and Pierre Rebière, from France, negotiated in Madrid on behalf of the Comintern on 22 October.
⁴
The three visited Azaña and Largo Caballero, who handed over responsibility to Martínez Barrio (then presiding over a committee to reorganize the army). It does not seem as if any one of these three republican politicians were enthusiastic for the idea, but they believed that the publicity at least would be good.

The formation of International Brigades then became the work of the Comintern. Each communist party was instructed to raise a given number of volunteers. In many cases the prescribed figure was higher than local parties could attain. Most of the ablest leaders of the Comintern, not already involved in Spain, were employed in this way. The future Marshal Tito, Josip Broz, for example, was in Paris organizing, from a small left-bank hotel, the flow of recruits through his so-called ‘secret railway’, which provided passports for East European volunteers, and the experienced Jules Humbert-Droz found himself doing the same thing in Switzerland.
⁵
Where the volunteer was not a commu
nist, he was investigated by an NKVD representative and by a communist doctor—the latter at the French-Spanish border.
¹
Many admittedly escaped this security checking, however, especially those who joined the volunteers in Spain or
en route.
Some adventurers in search of excitement joined—such as Nick Gillain, a Belgian, who later gave his reason for joining up as ‘spirit of adventure, lassitude, and this rainy autumn of 1936’.
²
About 60 per cent were communists before volunteering, and a further 20 per cent probably became communists during their experiences in Spain. From all countries (including Britain), 80 per cent of the Brigades were members of the working class.
³
Most were young men, though some of the Germans and Italians, militant refugees from fascist régimes, were veterans of the First World War. Many, especially among the French, were at that time unemployed
⁴
and many had experience of street-fighting against ‘the fascists’ in Berlin, Paris and even London. That was not the same as fighting the ‘Moors’, or the Foreign Legion, as they soon discovered.

About 500 to 600 refugee communists were sent to Spain who had been exiles in Russia.
⁵
Among these were men such as Stern (‘Kleber’), Zaisser (Gómez), Zalka (‘Lukács’) and Galicz (‘Gal’) who had fought in both the First World War and probably in the International Brigades in the Russian army. They played a leading part in those in Spain.
⁶

An English communist volunteer aptly summed up the motives of his countrymen for volunteering by saying, ‘undoubtedly the great majority are here for the sake of an ideal, no matter what motive prompted them to seek one’.
⁷
Many volunteers regarded the battle which they
were fighting in Spain as a first step in the struggle against the enemy at home; particularly the Italians, who were able to use Spanish radio stations to broadcast in Italian against Mussolini: ‘the artillery of the loudspeaker’, as ‘Carlos’ put it.
¹
The Spanish war thus rejuvenated the Italian anti-fascist struggle. A Czech communist, such as Artur London, could regard his service in the International Brigades as part of the anti-Nazi struggle in Central Europe.
²