This sort of thing encouraged defection. Yezhov therefore strengthened his appeal for loyalty by another method. The mobile groups had as one of their first priorities the making of an example of any colleague who broke with Stalin.
Ignace Reiss, an NKVD Resident in Switzerland, broke with the regime in July 1937. His body, riddled with bullets, was found on a road near Lausanne. The Swiss police also found in the abandoned baggage of the friend of Reiss’s who had betrayed him a box of poisoned chocolates, apparently intended for his children.73
Agabekov, former OGPU Resident in Turkey, had broken with the regime as early as 1929. He was murdered in Belgium in 1938.74 Walter Krivitsky, whose book is a useful source for this period, had been NKVD Resident in Holland. On 10 February 1941 he was found shot in a hotel room in Washington.
When the situation among the spies abroad had been largely cleared up, it became possible finally to dispense with Slutsky. But in order to avoid troubling the agents still in the field, this was done tactfully. His death on 17 February 1938 was announced in a short friendly obituary the next day.
In fact, he appears to have been poisoned by Frinovsky, by then Deputy Head of the NKVD, in his office (though a recent Soviet account makes it suicide). Slutsky’s deputy, Shpiegelglas, was suddenly called in and told that Slutsky had had a heart attack. Slutsky lay in state in the main hall of the NKVD club, with a guard of honor. But many NKVD officers had some smattering of forensic medicine and at once noticed on his cheeks the spots indicating cyanide poisoning.75
IN SPAIN
Slutsky had recently given important service in Spain, which by now had become a major theater of operation for the Purge—not only at the level of Yezhov’s mobile groups, which roamed the country arresting and killing deviationists on the international scale, like Camillo Bernini. For there were also larger political issues: the supression of Spanish “Trotskyism” and the gaining of effective control of the Spanish Government.
As early as December 1936, the Soviet press was speaking of the necessity for the elimination of POUM, the heretical Marxist Party of Catalonia,76 equivalent of the British ILP—that is to say, revolutionary Socialists opposed to Communist methods. It was not in any real sense “Trotskyite” (and the few genuine Spanish Trotskyites did not belong to it). While its Twenty-ninth Division (in which George Orwell served) was fighting against Franco on the Aragon front, the Russians were able to secure its suppression.
Jesds Hernéndez, one of the two Communists in the Spanish Republican Government, tells us how he was summoned by the Soviet Ambassador, Rosenberg, and introduced to Slutsky, then going under the pseudonym Marcos. Slutsky said that the suppression of POUM was an urgent matter. Not only was it openly criticizing the Soviet Union, and in particular the Zinoviev and Pyatakov Trials, but it was attempting to bring Trotsky to Spain.
(There seems to be nothing in this latter allegation, but if the Russians believed it, Stalin might well have had qualms. In a civil war or revolution, it could have been argued, Trotsky’s name was “worth 40,000 bayonets.” In fact, such an idea was chimerical, and even to Spaniards not basically hostile to Trotsky the disadvantages of his presence must have outweighed the advantages.)
Rosenberg remarked that he had often told Spanish Prime Minister Largo Caballero that the liquidation of POUM interested Stalin personally, but that Largo Caballero would not listen to this. Slutsky made it clear that an alternative method was to be found—a provocation mounted by the NKVD which would allow the seizure of power in Barcelona by the Communists, and give them the excuse to get rid of Largo Caballero if he attempted to undo the fait accompli.
The operation was prepared by Antonov-Ovseenko, then Soviet Consul General in Barcelona, and Ernő Gerő, later to be overthrown in the leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party by the revolution of 1956, and at that time senior Comintern operative in Spain.
On 3 May 1937, the subservient Spanish Communist whom they had intruded into the leadership of the Catalan police, Rodríguez Sala, seized the Barcelona telephone exchange from the anarcho-syndicalist CNT trade unionists who had controlled it since the beginning of the war. The left-wing organizations, including POUM, resisted, and after four days of fighting, which is said to have caused about 1,000 deaths, they were put down by specially prepared police troops brought in from Valencia and elsewhere. On 15 May, the Communist Ministers in the Spanish Cabinet asked for the formal suppression of POUM. But even so, Largo Caballero again refused.
Stalin’s orders to get rid of Largo Caballero and to put in Dr. Negrin as Premier were now transmitted to the Spanish Politburo at a meeting with the Comintern representatives, including Togliatti and Gerő.77
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 leaders still surviving, the Government was able to insist on no further “disappearances,” though the rank and file were shot freely. Julian Gorkin, representative of POUM on the Central Committee of the People’s Militia, was one of those who survived.
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.