Titans of History (63 page)

He had risen to prominence in post-Revolutionary Russia as a journalist and a playwright for the Moscow Arts Theater. His smash hit
Days of the Turbins
, an adaptation of his superb Civil War novel
The White Guard
, was premiered in 1926. Based on Bulgakov's own happy upbringing in a large and loving upper-middle-class family,
Days of the Turbins
was the first play since the Revolution to present a sympathetic portrayal of the counter-revolutionary Whites. Under duress, Bulgakov had changed the play's title and provided an ending loosely sympathetic to the communist cause. It was enough to convince Stalin, who, enjoying its portrayal of family life in the Civil War, interpreted the play as a demonstration of the overwhelming strength of Bolshevism. It became Stalin's favorite play; he saw it fifteen times.

In the last decade of his life Bulgakov, increasingly ill and disillusioned, had two lifelines. The first was Stalin, who saved Bulgakov from total destitution while at the same time stifling his career. Stalin recognized Bulgakov's brilliance as much as his political unreliability; if he had known that Bulgakov was writing
The Master and Margarita
in secrecy, he would have had him liquidated. After a sinister yet encouraging personal phone call from the tyrant to Bulgakov, his favorite play became part of the Moscow Arts Theater's repertoire: Stalin secured him a position as assistant director. Bulgakov's second lifeline was his third wife, Yelena Sergeyevna, the model for Margarita, whose unconditional love sustains and saves the persecuted Master. Yelena ensured the survival of Bulgakov's masterpiece, safeguarding the manuscript until its publication just before her death in 1970.

Bulgakov was not a dissident as such: he survived in Stalinist Russia in order to write. He was in this sense an ordinary writer, not a political campaigner. Like the other creative geniuses of Stalinist Russia—the poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, the poet-novelist Boris Pasternak (author of
Dr. Zhivago
), the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the novelist Vasily Grossman (author of
Life and Fate
, another work that survived to undermine tyranny)—he made his compromises with the system in order to
survive (though Mandelstam was finally crushed after his scabrous poetic attack on Stalin himself). Indeed, he wrote the play
Batumi
about Stalin's youthful exploits to celebrate the dictator's 60th birthday in 1939. When Stalin rejected the play, Bulgakov's health collapsed and he died soon afterward. Stalin himself boasted “we even got Bulgakov to work for us.”

Many other writers were killed by Stalin, yet as Bulgakov famously wrote: “Manuscripts don't burn!”

1892–1975

I am responsible only to God and history
.

General Franco

General Francisco Franco, the generalissimo of Spain from 1939 to 1975, is in some ways the forgotten tyrant, his deeds overshadowed by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, yet he was truly one of history's monsters. In the 1930s, this fascistic warlord won power with brutality and terror in a savage civil war, aided by his ally Hitler, and proceeded to terrorize the civilian population of Spain for twenty-five years. As democracy thrived in the rest of western Europe following the Second World War, his brutal military dictatorship continued to crush dissent, and to shoot and torture his supposed enemies.

Franco was born in northwest Spain in 1892, in the naval city of Ferrol. His mother was a pious and conservative upper-middle-class Catholic; his father a difficult and eccentric man who expected
his son to follow him into the navy. Due to naval cutbacks, however, at just fourteen years old, Franco entered the army instead. Fiercely professional, he soon carved out his reputation as a brave and driven soldier, becoming a captain in 1916 and the youngest general in Spain in 1926, at age thirty-four.

Although staunchly loyal to the monarchy, Franco was not overtly involved in politics until 1931, when the Spanish king abdicated, leaving the government in the hands of left-wing republicans. When the conservatives won power back two years later, they identified Franco as a powerful potential ally and promoted him to major general, instructing him to suppress an uprising by Asturian miners in October 1934. Election victory for the left-wing Popular Front in 1936, however, saw Franco effectively demoted and sent to the Canary Islands, but just months later the right-wing Spanish nationalist bloc called on the army to join them in rebellion against the government, which had failed to stabilize the country. The Spanish Civil War had begun.

In a radio broadcast from the Canary Islands in July 1936, Franco declared he would join the rebels with immediate effect and, after mixed fortunes for Nationalist forces in Morocco and Madrid, he was declared generalissimo, effectively the leader of the Nationalist cause during the three years of war that followed.

Franco's wartime campaign was notorious for his indiscriminate brutalizing of civilian populations, aided on occasions by German and Italian fascist governments. Franco organized a White Terror in which 200,000 people were murdered. The most infamous atrocity was the 1937 market-day bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the German Condor Legion. Though it was not a military target and had no air defenses, the Luftwaffe pounded the town throughout the day and swooped over outgoing roads to mow down fleeing civilians as the town was engulfed in a fireball. An estimated 1654 people were slaughtered.

As Generalissimo Francisco Franco signed his deathlists, he would place E for execute for those to die, C for those spared and, most macabre and revealing of all, GARROTE Y PRENSA (Garrote with press coverage) next to the names of certain well-known people. Nothing so sums up the miserable wickedness of the victors of the Spanish Civil War. Franco resembled the 19th-century Spanish general who on his deathbed was asked if he forgave his enemies. “I have none.” he replied, “I had them all shot.”

For a generation of left-wing intellectuals, the struggle of Republican Spain to defend itself against Franco's Nationalists epitomized the struggle between socialist progress and fascist reaction. Idealistic intellectuals such as George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and the French novelist André Malraux flocked to Spain to fight for the Republican cause. In total, about 32,000 foreign volunteers from Europe and America fought in the campaign, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy pumped money and troops into Franco's army—and dropped bombs on the civilian populations in Republican-dominated areas.

In support of the Republic, Stalin's USSR supplied 331 tanks and 600 planes, together with a large number of pilots, in return for Spanish gold reserves. The Red Terror in Spain, according to recent historical research, accounted for the deaths of somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people. Precise figures are unknown.

During the bloody summer of 1936, 8000 suspected Nationalists were massacred in Madrid, and another 8000 in Catalonia—both Republican-controlled areas. Wealthy farmers, industrialists and those associated with the Catholic Church received particularly brutal treatment at the hands of the various Republican factions. Nearly 7000 clerics, including nearly 300 nuns, were killed, despite being noncombatants.

Some Republicans defended these massacres on the grounds that the other side was worse. Others tried to stand back. Commenting
on the atrocities committed by his own side, the anarchist intellectual Federica Montseny noted “a lust for blood inconceivable in honest men” before the war.

One of the ironies of history is that while the Stalinist terror within the Republicans is as notorious as the Red Terror that slaughtered supposed rightists, Franco and the Nationalists killed many, many more: some 200,000 were murdered by Franco in his White Terror during the war, while another half million remained in his torture chambers and camps afterward. Franco really delivered on his associate General Queipo's promise: “For every person you kill, we will kill ten.”

Victory, when it finally came, was not enough for Franco. “The war is over,” he declared in 1939, “but the enemy is not dead.” He had drawn up lists of reds during the conflict: alleged communists to be arrested. Now in control of the state, he set about rounding up and liquidating his enemies. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans fled the country as, between 1939 and 1943, anything between 100,000 and 200,000 noncombatants or surrendering troops were summarily and systematically executed.

Repression characterized every aspect of Franco's regime. He nominally re-established the monarchy—without appointing a king—but retained all executive powers in his own hands. Democracy was abandoned, criticism regarded as treason, imprisonment and abuse of opponents rife, Parliament a mere puppet to the executive, rival political parties and strikes banned, the Catholic Church given a free rein over social policy and education, the media muzzled, creative talent strangled by strict censorship and any dissent ruthlessly suppressed by his secret police, who practiced widespread torture and murder right up to Franco's death in 1975. Dismissive of international criticism, Franco himself insisted on personally signing all death warrants until his death while his family married into the aristocracy and amassed colossal wealth.

A true mark of the regime was Franco's shameful decision to grant asylum to Ante Paveli
ć
, the fascist dictator of Croatia during the Second World War—a man thought to be responsible for over 600,000 deaths. Franco also during that time repaid Hitler and Mussolini's support during the Civil War by sending troops—albeit limited in number—to assist the Nazis in their fight against the Soviets. But he survived by resisting Hitler's request for him to join the war and then posing as an anti-communist after 1945.

The ghost of Franco has yet to be completely exorcized from Spanish politics, as recently as 2004 a commission having been set up to compensate his victims and oversee the exhumation of the mass graves.

1893–1976

I look at Mao, I see Stalin, a perfect copy
.

Nikita Khrushchev

Chairman Mao, revolutionary, poet and guerrilla commander, was the communist dictator of China whose brutality, egotism, utopian radicalism, total disdain for human life and suffering, and insanely grandiose schemes led to the murder of 70 million of his own citizens. A born manipulator and ruthless pursuer of power, this monster was happy to torment and murder his own comrades, to execute millions, permit millions more to starve and even risk nuclear war, in order to promote his Marxist-Stalinist-Maoist
vision of a superpower China under his own semi-divine cult of personality.

Mao was born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province on December 26, 1893. Forced to work on the family farm in his early teens, he rebelled against his father—a successful grain dealer—and left home to seek an education at the provincial capital, Changsa, where he participated in the revolt against the Manchu dynasty in 1911. He flirted with various careers, but never committed to anything until he subsequently joined the recently formed Chinese Communist Party in 1921. He married Yang Kaihui in 1920, by whom he had two sons (later marrying He Zizhen in 1928 and well-known actress Lan Ping—real name Jiang Qing—in 1939). At twenty-four, he recorded his amoral philosophy: “People like me only have a duty to ourselves …” He worshipped “power like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, like a sex-maniac on the heat … We adore times of war … We love sailing the sea of upheavals … The country must be destroyed then reformed … People like me long for its destruction.” In 1923, the communists entered an alliance with the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). Sent back to Hunan to promote the Kuomintang, he continued to foment revolutionary activity, predicting that Chinese peasants would “rise like a tornado or tempest—a force so extraordinarily swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it.”

In 1926, the Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek—the toothless military strongman whose vicious, corrupt and utterly inept gangster-backed regime would enable Mao and the communists ultimately to triumph and conquer China—ordered the so-called Northern Expedition to consolidate fragmented government power. In April 1927, having defeated over thirty warlords, he slaughtered the communists in Shanghai, being named generalissimo the following year, with all China under his rule. Mao, meanwhile, had retired to a base in the Jinggang Mountains, from where, emerging
as a red leader, he embarked on a guerrilla campaign. “Political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” he said.

In 1931, Mao became chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi. Happy to murder, blackmail and poison his rivals—killing 700,000 in a terror 1931–5—he displayed the same political gifts as Stalin: a will for power, ruthlessness, an addiction to turmoil and an astonishing ability to manipulate. Like Stalin also, he destroyed his wives and mistresses, ignored his children and poisoned everyone whose lives he touched: many went insane.

In 1933, after several defeats, Chiang launched a new war of attrition resulting in a dramatic turnaround that prompted the communists to sideline Mao and, on the advice of Soviet agent Otto Braun, launch a disastrous counter-attack, leading in 1936 to a full-scale retreat that became known as the Long March. By the late 1930s, using gullible Western writers like Edgar Snow and Han Suyin, Mao had created his myth as a peasant leader, poet and guerrilla-maestro, the march portrayed as an epic journey in which he heroically saved the Red Army from Nationalist attack. In fact, much was invented to conceal military ineptitude and his deliberate wastage of armies to discredit communist rivals.

In 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. Chiang was forced by Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal who kidnapped the generalissimo, to combine forces with Mao. Secretly Mao strove to undermine Chiang's war effort, even briefly cooperating with Japanese intelligence. By 1943, he had achieved supremacy in the Communist Party, poisoning and purging rivals and critics with brutal efficiency. He continued to court Soviet support for the communists, whose future was assured when Stalin helped defeat Japan in 1945.