They underestimated his thoughtful adaptiveness and the extent of his break with Marxism–Leninism. Equally clearly he was eager to avoid the mistakes made under Lenin’s leadership. He told guests at a dinner party attended by Georgi Dimitrov that Lenin had been wrong to call for a European civil war during the Great War.13 He also set about studying the history of international relations, and much scholarly research on this was published at his instigation in Moscow in the 1930s. While thrusting this information into the frame of his worldview, he retained a readiness to keep Soviet foreign policy flexible. Lenin had come to power with this attitude. Stalin had been impressed and sought to emulate him. Just as Lenin had confronted and survived the deadly diplomatic trial of strength with Germany in 1917–18, Stalin was determined to prove his mettle in the contests of the 1930s. As the threats in Europe and Asia grew, he wanted to be intellectually prepared. Without such knowledge, he knew, he could be caught out of his depth; and he had no desire to put himself as an innocent into the arms of the People’s Commissariat of External Affairs or of the Communist International.
Civil war had broken out in Spain in July 1936 when the fascist general Francisco Franco revolted against the Republican coalition government of Diego Barrio (who derived authority from a popular front). Franco appealed for assistance from Germany and Italy. Both complied, and Hitler’s Luftwaffe was given experience in bombing towns and villages. Meanwhile France and the United Kingdom, while sympathising with the elected government, maintained a position of neutrality. The Spanish government rallied all the forces it could on the political left. Spain’s communists in particular stood by it.
In Moscow the time had come for a decision on whether or not to intervene as Hitler and Mussolini had already done. Deployment of Red military units was not feasible at such a distance. But the revolutionary tradition impelled Stalin to look favourably on the request from Madrid for help. So too did the awareness that if no resistance to German assertiveness were shown, Europe as a whole would be exposed to the expansionist aims of the Third Reich. Failure to act would be taken as a sign that the policy of the popular front had no substance. Finance and munitions were dispatched by boat to Spain from Leningrad. Simultaneously the Communist International sent the Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti under the alias Ercoli to direct the activities of the Spanish communists. Togliatti and his fellow political and military emissaries found a chaotic scene. At Stalin’s command they sought to turn the Spanish Communist Party into the leading force on the left without actually entering the government coalition. The policy of the popular front was maintained and Moscow frowned on all talk of a communist seizure of power. Dimitrov came into his own by leading the implementation of the general line agreed in the Kremlin: he knew it was not safe to ignore his master’s voice.14
As the Republic’s armed forces were pushed on to the retreat by Franco, the Spanish government pressed for the communists to enter the coalition. Stalin had to be phoned for consent and then Dimitrov sent the tactical instructions to communist leader José Diaz. Eventually the socialist party chief Largo Caballero emerged as head of government. By March 1937 Stalin had become distinctly edgy about being drawn into a military struggle of internal significance without being able to control the consequences, and reports about the effectiveness of the coalition and its army were not encouraging. His instinct was to pull out of Spain and disband the International Brigades in the event that Germany and Italy were also to withdraw; but for the moment he insisted on a merger of the communist and socialist parties in Spain.15 This immediately became Comintern policy. Yet the inter-party negotiations in Spain made little progress: years of mutual antagonism could not be discounted overnight. Nor did Stalin help the situation by deploying NKVD agents to seek out and liquidate Spanish Trotskyists. Distrust on the political left grew rapidly as members of the POUM, loyal to Trotski’s ideas, were rounded up. Remorselessly the Spanish Communist Party reinforced its influence in the government.
The situation changed from month to month and the socialists refused to do the bidding of the Spanish Communist Party. By February 1938 Stalin had concluded that the communists should resign from the government. Dimitrov in Moscow and Togliatti in Spain complied with the decision despite the disarray it was bound to cause in the anti-Franco alliance.16 The political tensions on the left were not concocted out of nothing by Stalin. But he made them murderously worse than they need have been; and if anyone thought that his accusations against internal victims in the USSR were merely an instrument of despotism without genuine importance for him, they were disillusioned by events in Spain. Exactly the same political persecutions were put in train. Stalin was determined that the far-left elements on the Republican side should be liquidated before they could infect the Spanish Communist Party with their diseased purposes. Of course there were plenty of leftists in Spain who by their own profession were Trotskyists, anarchists or independent communists. Stalin had no need to ponder the options: he knew he had to cauterise the wound of far-left pluralism. Spain was going to be helped on the terms of his political homicidalism.
The Civil War had by then turned decisively in Franco’s favour. By March 1939 it was over. The Republicans had lost the protracted struggle against reactionary forces backed by German and Italian fascism. Stalin’s policy was criticised by Trotski as excessively cautious. For Trotski, the Spanish Civil War offered one of those regular opportunities to spread revolution west of the USSR and to undermine the political far right across Europe. Stalin, though, was mindful of the risks he would run with any strong intervention. Always he dreaded thrusting the French and British governments into the arms of General Franco. Too obvious a communist hegemony over the Spanish government coalition might easily have brought this about. But he and the Comintern at least did something, and it is hardly likely that the Republicans would have held out so long if he had not sanctioned the Spanish Communist Party’s participation. His Trotskyist critics accused him of excessive pragmatism in his management of Soviet foreign policy. They ignored the limited resources available to the USSR. Economically, militarily and — above all — geographically there was no serious chance for him to do more than he achieved at the time.
If he could not have done much more to help, however, he could certainly have done less to hinder. His behaviour towards the Spanish political left, especially in the suppression of the POUM, rightly earned him the opprobrium of George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. For Stalin acted within the cage of his assumptions. He could not imagine how a revolutionary movement could be properly mobilised unless it was purged of untrustworthy elements. At the very same time as he was getting rid of such people in the USSR he was determined to eliminate them from the ranks of the Comintern. The cause of the Revolution would rest on the inner health of the political far left. Trotskyists were infectious vermin. Stalin’s Comintern agents fought for the cause of Soviet internal politics in the mountains and plains of distant Spain.
35. APPROACHES TO WAR
Domestic politics, state security and foreign policy were knotted together in the late 1930s. Stalin arrested hundreds of thousands of harmless Soviet citizens who were of an awkward national ancestry. Poles, Finns, Chinese and Koreans resident in border areas next to the states of their co-nationals were routinely deported to other distant regions of the USSR. Even the Greeks living in the Soviet republics by the Black Sea, hundreds of maritime miles from Greece, suffered this fate.1 Soviet state security policy had a national and ethnic dimension. While promoting the press and schooling for non-Russians in the Soviet multinational state, Stalin showed an intense hostility to some among them. What has become known as ethnic cleansing was not new to the USSR. The Politburo had practised such a policy against Cossacks in the north Caucasus at the end of the Civil War.2 Proposals for cleansing on the basis of nationality resurfaced at the start of the Five-Year Plan.3 But Stalin’s deportations, arrests and executions during and after the Great Terror mounted to a higher scale of national and ethnic repression.