HOW THE NKVD FRAMED THE POUM
INTRODUCTION
THE CONTROVERSY over Land and Freedom, Ken Loach’s film about the Spanish Civil War, has focused attention on the tragic fate of the anti-Stalinist socialist party, the POUM.1 This account of the POUM’s suppression in 1937 is taken from the memoirs of Jesús Hernández, published in 1953 in Mexico as Yo fuí un ministro de Stalin (I Was a Minister of Stalin) and in a French version as La Grande Trahison (The Great Betrayal).
At the time of the Civil War, Hernández was a leading figure in the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), which he had joined in Bilbao at its foundation in 1920 while still in his teens. He spent the early 1930s in Moscow as a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, before returning to Spain to become one of the sixteen Communist deputies elected to the Cortes in February 1936. He was a Communist minister in the Popular Front governments of both Largo Caballero and Negrín and was then appointed commissar-general of the Republican armies of the centre and south.
Throughout the Civil War Hernández acted publicly as a loyal exponent of Comintern strategy. Following the rebellion by Generals Franco and Mola in July 1936, he was quick to deny that the Spanish Communists had any revolutionary aims, even in the long term. Writing in August 1936 in the PCE daily Mundo Obrero, he declared that it was ‘absolutely false that the present workers’ movement has for its object the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship after the war has terminated.... We Communists are the first to repudiate this supposition. We are motivated exclusively by a desire to defend the democratic republic’.2 And this at a time when the democratic republic had pretty well collapsed. The government was powerless, the bulk of the repressive state apparatus had gone over to Franco, military resistance to the fascists was in the hands of the armed working class, workers had taken control of factories, transport and communications, and peasants were seizing and in many cases collectivising the land – a revolutionary situation if ever there was one.
Hernández’s differences with the PCE developed only after Franco’s victory. Following the death of general secretary José Díaz in 1942, Hernández challenged Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) for the party leadership. He failed, and consequently was expelled from the PCE in 1944. Later, impressed by the Yugoslavs’ defiance of Stalin, he set up an Independent Spanish Communist Party based in Belgrade, but it never gained any influence. He died in exile in Mexico in 1971.
The central theme of Hernández’s memoirs, reflecting the author’s then Titoite
sympathies, is the need for Communist parties to determine their own actions in accordance with the situation in their own countries. So, although he condemns the way in which intervention by NKVD and Comintern agents in Spain undermined the authority of the national leadership, he does not offer the sort of fundamental reassessment of the Communists’ Popular Front strategy made by another former party leader, Fernando Claudín, in his book The Communist Movement.3 The frame-up of the POUM is itself depicted by Hernández as arising exclusively from Stalin’s need to justify the extermination of his opponents within the Soviet Union. He ignores the fact that the PCE’s commitment to re-establishing the power of the bourgeois state and defending the rights of capitalist property necessarily involved the suppression of those like the POUM who, however inconsistently, opposed the destruction of the revolutionary gains made by the Spanish working class in July-August 1936.
Nevertheless, Hernández does provide a detailed inside account of developments within the PCE leadership and the Republican government. His exposure of the role of the Soviet
security service, the NKVD, in framing the POUM as a fascist organisation and murdering its leader Andrés Nin4 is of particular importance. Hernández’s tribute to the courage of Nin, who despite the most appalling tortures refused to sign the false confession which would have led to the deaths of his comrades, would alone justify reprinting this account. As Hugh Thomas wrote of Nin’s murder in his hook The Spanish Civil War, ‘the crime
reverberates through the years, as do all the contemporaneous crimes in Russia’.5
At
the time, needless to say, the Communist Party of Great Britain gave wholehearted support to the frame-up and suppression of the POUM. In 1938, just before the surviving POUM leaders were put on trial for espionage, the Communist publishing house Lawrence and Wishart issued a pamphlet by the French Stalinist journalist Georges Soria entitled Trotskyism In the Service of Franco: A Documented Record of Treachery by the POUM in Spain. This included excerpts
from and photographic reproductions of documents forged by the NKVD in order to implicate the POUM in a Falangist spy ring. With regard to Nin’s murder, Soria claimed that the POUM leader was freed from prison by fellow fascists and had then disappeared. ‘From that moment’, according to Soria, ‘in spite of the most intensive search by the police, no trace of Nin has been found and no one has any idea where he is, whether he is a refugee in one of the foreign embassies which provide such generous hospitality to the Fascists of Franco’s Fifth Column; or whether he managed to get through to the rebel territory and preserve his anonymity in order not to compromise his friends who are in Republican jails.’6
British
Communists today, most of whom would now recognise Stalin’s purges in the Soviet
Union for the atrocities they were, still baulk at confronting the truth about
Stalinist atrocities in Spain. Back in 1976, it is true, Monty Johnstone was
prepared to accept that ‘NKVD agents were sent into Spain and carried out
measures of repression against honest revolutionaries, such as Andrés
Nin’.7 More typical, however, was the Our History pamphlet on
the Spanish Civil War, published around the same time, in which Johnstone’s
fellow CPers Nan Green and Alonso Elliott referred dismissively to ‘stories
about "NKVD agents" in Spain’ and opined that ‘most of them are apocryphal’.
Concerning Nin’s murder, these writers stated blandly that it took place
following ‘his disappearance in mysterious circumstances’.8 Noreen
Branson, in the third volume of the official history of the Communist Party of
Great Britain, agreed that Nin was ‘almost certainly executed’ but was similarly
reticent about naming the authors of the
crime.9
More
recently, in the course of a debate over Land and Freedom, Jeff Sawtell
of the Morning Star repeated the fairytale about Nin’s ‘mysterious’
disappearance and added that, while it was ‘not inconceivable’ that he had been
‘executed as a traitor’, the argument that the NKVD was responsible for Nin’s
death was the product of ‘anti-Sovietism’.10 Frank Graham, a former
International Brigader who reviewed Loach’s film in the New Worker, went
so far as to applaud the fact that Nin was ‘executed for treason’ and that
‘several hundred members of the POUM who were secret members of the Falange
suffered the same fate’.11 If nothing else, this pamphlet should
consign such disgraceful nonsense to the dustbin of
historiography.
It
would, of course, be naive to rely completely on the accuracy of Hernández’s
version of events. His verbatim reconstruction of conversations which took place
a decade and a half earlier, and which he can have remembered only in general
terms, is clearly open to question. Hernández also had obvious reasons for
exaggerating his own opposition to Moscow’s crimes in Spain – as we have seen,
in his public activity during the Civil War there was no hint of any differences
with the official party line. And he undoubtedly had scores to settle with
former comrades like Pasionaria who denied him what he regarded as his rightful
position as PCE general secretary and then threw him out of the
party.
However,
for those who would reject Hernández’s memoirs as the work of an embittered
ex-Communist intent on slandering the movement he once led, it should be added
that recent research has confirmed his account of the NKVD’s role. In 1992 two
journalists from a Catalan TV station, who were preparing a documentary on Nin’s
assassination, discovered in the KGB archives in Moscow two letters from
Alexander Orlov, the NKVD chief in Spain. One letter, dated 23 May 1937,
explained how the material linking Nin with the fascists would be fabricated;
the other, dated 24 July 1937, gave details of NKVD and PCE involvement in the
torture and killing of Nin. The following year John Costello and Oleg Tsarev
published their book Deadly Illusions, which dealt in detail with Orlov’s
career, and quoted at length from both letters.
In
his letter of 23 May, Orlov informed Moscow that a genuine fascist spy ring had
been uncovered and documents seized, which he proposed to use as a basis for
forging evidence against the POUM. He wrote that he and his agents had ‘composed
the enclosed document, which indicates the cooperation of the POUM leadership
with the Spanish Falange organisation – and, through it, with Franco and
Germany. We will encypher
the contents of the document using Franco’s cypher, which we have at our
disposal, and will write it on the reverse side of the plan of the location of
our weapons emplacements in Casa del Campo which was taken from the Falangist
organisation’. This message would be written in invisible ink as would a few
lines added to another document. ‘A special chemical will develop these few
words or lines, then we will begin to test all the other documents with this
developer and thus expose the letter we have composed compromising the POUM
leadership.’ The second letter, written after Nin’s murder, even identified
roughly where the victim’s body lay. Nin, the newspaper El País reported,
was to be found neither in Salamanca nor in Berlin. The NKVD had buried his
mutilated corpse off the highway between Alcalá de Henares and Perales de
Tajuña.12
Although
Hernández’s book has been a major source for historians of the Spanish Civil War
and the PCE, it has never been published in English. The sections reproduced
here were serialised during 1953 in Labor Action, the US socialist paper
published by Max Shachtman’s Workers Party.13 The translation has
been checked against the Spanish text and amended. Explanatory notes have been
added.
Robert
Pitt, May 1996
1. The
Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers Party of Marxist Unification)
was formed in September 1935 from a fusion of two groupings. The larger of the
two was the BOC (Bloque Obrero y Campesino – Workers and Peasants Bloc), led by
Joaquín Maurín, which originated in the expelled Catalan Federation of the
Spanish Communist Party. The other grouping, the Izquierda Comunista (Communist
Left), was led by Andrés Nin and comprised the former section of Trotsky’s
International Left Opposition, from which it had broken in 1933. The POUM was
denounced as a Trotskyist organisation by the Spanish Communist Party, and this
characterisation is repeated by Hernández. Trotsky and his supporters in fact
condemned the POUM’s policies as centrist, while the POUM responded by accusing
the Trotskyists of sectarianism.
2.
Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain, 1978,
p.34.
3.
Fernando Claudín, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform,
1975, pp.210-244, 693-716.
4.
Andrés Nin attended the founding conference of the Red International of Labour
Unions (the Comintern’s trade union movement) in 1921 as part of the delegation
from the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union federation, the CNT. He stayed on in
Moscow to become assistant secretary of the RILU, and joined the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union. Within the CPSU Nin supported the Left Opposition and as a
result was expelled from the party in 1928. In 1930 he returned to Spain where
he led the Spanish section of the International Left Opposition. In September
1936 he became minister of justice in Catalonia but was excluded from the
government in December under pressure from the Stalinists.
5.
Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 1977, p.709.
6.
Georges Soria, Trotskyism in the Service of Franco, 1938,
p.23.
7.
Monty Johnstone, Trotsky and World Revolution, 1976,
p.12.
8.
Nan Green and A.M. Elliott, Spain Against Fascism 1936-39 (Our
History, No.67), 1976, p.22.
9.
Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain
1927-1941, 1985, p.244.
10.
Letter in the Camden New Journal, 26 October 1995.
11.
New Worker, 13 October 1995.
12.
Revolutionary History, Vol.4 No.4, 1993; John Costello and Oleg Tsarev,
Deadly Illusions, 1993, p.288. The NKVD agents who killed Nin were Orlov
and ‘Juzik’, who was apparently a Brazilian named José Escoy. The Spaniards were
identified only by the initials L, AF and IL, the names having been removed by
the Moscow archivists. Two other Communists observed but did not participate in
the torture and murder of Nin. These were the Hungarian Erno Gerö and another
man named Victor.
13.
I am obliged to Revolutionary History editor Al Richardson for directing
me to this source.
by Jesús
Hernández
WHEN I ARRIVED at the ministry, Cimorra handed me a small closed envelope.1 Inside was a card. I read: ‘Dear friend: If you have nothing more important to do, I expect you for tea at six in the evening. I must speak to you urgently. Greetings, Rosenberg.’2 I had spoken with the Soviet ambassador only a few times. Almost always I had visited him about some celebration or official reception. Now his invitation was personal and urgent.
Punctually at six I was at the embassy. ‘Go in. He’s expecting you’, one of the secretaries told me. There in the comfortable office was his excellency, the ambassador of
the Soviet Union. ‘Thanks for coming’, he said, shaking
hands.
‘I don’t know the reason, comrade Rosenberg. But I am at your disposal.’
‘Thanks.
Have a seat. The tea will be here right away. Or do you prefer
coffee?’
‘If
it’s all the same I’d prefer coffee.’
Rosenberg
rang a bell and ordered: ‘Coffee for the gentleman.’ He took out an expensive
Russian-lacquer cigarette case with miniature engravings, and offered me a
Soviet cigarette with a long cardboard tip. ‘It’s better tobacco than yours’, he
said, smiling.
‘Tobacco
is a matter of habit. Besides, most of our tobacco isn’t from this country, it’s
Cuban’, I explained.
‘I’m
expecting a friend; I’d like to you to meet him. He is very much interested in
getting personally acquainted with you’, said the ambassador. At that very
moment one of the secretaries announced the ‘friend’. Rosenberg rose quickly
with a haste that showed his respect. The new arrival stretched out his hand to
the ambassador and, turning to me, said in Spanish with a French accent:
‘Comrade Hernández?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am ... Marcos. I like the name’, he said, smiling. I was already accustomed to the fact that the ‘tovarichi’ baptised themselves with Spanish names and I attached no significance to it. Afterwards I learned that his name was Slutsky3 and that he was the chief of the Foreign Division of the GPU4 in Western Europe.
‘I came only a little while ago, not more than a few days ago. I hope that you will excuse me for bothering you, but – it would not be prudent for me to be seen
going into your ministry or into the party headquarters. This place is more discreet. And there are so many Russians in Valencia!’5
‘Yes,
another Russian more or less, nobody notices. And besides, I don’t believe that
anyone has any interest in watching the Russians. Almost all the police are in
our hands’, I said, laughing.
‘But
there are agencies that the party does not control. And above all, there is the
spy service, Comrade Hernández, the enemy’s spies’, he said with a certain
vehemence.
Tea
and coffee were served, and while the smart waiter filled the cups with delicate
precision, I observed friend ‘Marcos’. He was getting close to fifty. Tall and
ungainly. Drooping shoulders and a sunken chest gave him an ape-like look. His
sharp-featured face was topped by a shaven head, looking from chin to crown like
a vertical melon. Eyes a bit slitted and high cheek bones. ‘A true Russian’, I
thought.
‘That’s
what I wanted to talk to you about, precisely about that, espionage’, he went
on.
‘Well,
I’m listening’, I said, with some curiosity.
‘Our
foreign service has become aware that some elements of the POUM are taking steps
to bring Trotsky to Spain. Do you know anything about it?’
‘That’s
the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘That
shows that the Republic’s counter-intelligence services are very
deficient.’
‘I don’t
believe they’re deficient, except in having little interest in the escapades of
the POUM.’
‘That’s
what’s serious.’
‘I
don’t see why.’
Our ape-like friend’s features contracted, denoting disgust. ‘If the responsible
party men attach no importance to this band of counter-revolutionaries and agents of the enemy, that helps us understand many things that have happened in the war’, he said harshly.
‘In Spain Trotskyism has never awakened from sleep. And I don’t see what influence
the POUM can have on the things that have been happening to us’, I replied with the intention of putting him down.
‘The POUM has units at the front’, explained Rosenberg.
‘Not all of them have to be Communist, do they?’
‘But if they aren’t Communist, we must make sure that they are not enemies’, Marcos
persisted.
‘You can pose the question in that way in Russia, but in Spain nobody would take us
seriously if we called the Trotskyists agents of Franco.’
‘But they are rabidly anti-Soviet! Don’t you read La Batalla?’
‘Yes, I read it. And they say a lot more about us than about Stalin. They also say a
lot about the Anarchists, but that doesn’t bring me to the conclusion that our principal aim is to wrangle with them when Franco is shooting impartially at everybody.’
‘That’s
an error! That’s it, that’s it!’ – and the slanting eyes of the old Chekist cast
withering looks at me.
Rosenberg smoked in silence, piling up mounds of cigarette ashes in the ashtray, as if he were not present at our conversation.
‘I’m talking to you with the authority my experience has given me’, said ‘Marcos’.
‘Tell me, Marcos, why did you call me in to tell me all this, instead of
explaining it personally to the secretary of our party? After all is said and done, it’s he who ought to raise these questions in the Bureau.’
‘Because
I was told at the "House"6 that you’re a man of action, and for our
work we need men who are energetic and determined.’
‘I’m
grateful for their confidence, but the "man of action" in me is a thing of the
past. Everyone has his period, and mine has already been and
gone.’
‘Where something has been, something always remains’, threw in Rosenberg, in suave
tones.
‘It isn’t a matter now of your going to plant a bomb under Prieto’s printing press.
You knew, Rosenberg?’ Marcos said, turning to him with a sly smile. ‘Hernández wanted to blow up Prieto’s print shop in Bilbao.’7
‘At that time I wanted to do it – and even more stupid things’, I replied in
disgust.
‘No, now it’s entirely a different matter. We want you to understand that it is
necessary to take practical measures against Trotskyism, and help us. Your
ministerial post can make the job easier for us.’
‘My ministerial post has been given me by the party, and I can go ahead only when
the party orders me to act along one line or another’, I declared with
asperity.
‘Marcos’ caressed his sharp-pointed chin, thinking it over. ‘Our services are performed
somewhat on the fringe of the party’, he said. Rosenberg smiled imperceptibly.
‘Marcos’ looked at him fixedly. I think’, continued Marcos, ‘that you realise
how much trust in you such a proposition reflects. The ‘House" gives you a mark
of distinction.’
‘I don’t think it’s worth while to insist’, I cut in, ‘we’ll be wasting
time.’
Marcos’s look immediately became more intense. ‘You don’t even know what it’s about’, he said.
‘No.’
‘It’s a question of getting in our hands documents which show the POUM’s contacts with
the Falange8 and we have to act fast.’
‘If such documents exist, the procedure is to draw up the report and hand over those
responsible to the courts. Once the evidence is verified, we’ll have no reason
to go about it crookedly.’
‘We still have to get some more facts to make sure they don’t get
away.’
‘And how can I be useful to you?’
‘For the moment, in no way. That’s our agency’s affair. But when the time comes to make certain arrests, maybe we’ll run into some difficulties with some of the authorities, and at that time your collaboration can be decisive.’
‘See me then, when you have all the evidence, and I’m ready to bring the case all the
way to the cabinet itself.’
‘I
knew we’d get together in the end!’ he said with visible satisfaction. And, after a pause: ‘Orlov and Bielov9 are working on this they’ll lay it all before you.’ And then addressing Rosenberg: ‘Have you talked to the president of the Council about this matter?’
‘About
this …?’
‘I
mean, the POUM in general.’
‘Yes.
Many times. But Largo Caballero10 resists taking political measures
against the Trotskyists.’
‘Did you tell him that this matter is of extraordinary interest to our
government?’
‘I told him that Stalin himself is interested in it.’
‘And
what did he answer?’
‘That as long as they act within the law, there is no reason to proceed against them, and still less to close down their premises and suspend their press; that his government is a government of the Popular Front.’
‘Popular
Front, Popular Front! We’ll have to take care of it another way’, said Marcos
angrily.
The
Chekist rose. He stuck his hand out to me and, while we took leave, said with an air of confidence: ‘Everything will turn out just as we
want.’
When he had gone, it seemed to me I observed a change in Rosenberg, something like an
inner satisfaction. ‘It’s a serious matter. All these things are disagreeable,
even though they’re necessary’, he said sadly. I understood that Rosenberg could
not put more than that into words, but behind the words was the expression on
his face. ‘This man’s reaction is something like mine’, I thought. ‘No doubt he
feels aversion towards the GPU, or fears it.’
‘Friend "Marcos" is a pure-blooded Chekist’, I said jokingly. ‘Hmm’, grunted Rosenberg.
I said goodbye. When he put out his hand, nobody could have supposed that this
man was already sentenced to die with a bullet in the back of the head fired by
one of the ‘pure-blooded’ gunmen, in the cellars of the Lubianka in Moscow.
[...]
*
In
the government Dr Negrín had assigned me two cabinet portfolios, education and
health.11 Prieto was minister of national defence;
Zugazagoitia,12 a Socialist, was minister of the interior; Colonel
Ortega,13 Communist, was in charge of the General Security
Administration.
Two
or three days after the formation of the new government,14 I was
awakened at dawn by the insistent ringing of the phone.
‘Who’s
that’?’
‘Hello!
It’s Ortega.’
Then: ‘No warrants. Let them come to see
me at the ministry. I expect them at ten.
Salud.’
The
NKVD was in operation. The ape-like figure of ‘Marcos’ came back to my memory. I
recalled that he had told me: ‘Orlov and Bielov will lay it all before you’.
Ortega had just told me that Orlov had shown up at the General Security
Administration asking for some arrest warrants against various leaders of the
POUM, without telling the ministry anything about it.
Punctually,
precise as a chronometer, Orlov came to my office at ten in the morning. He was
almost two metres tall, with elegant and refined manners.15 He spoke
Spanish with some facility. He was not more than forty-five years old. At first
glance, no one would have suspected that behind that seeming air of distinction
was one of the most intransigent and sectarian NKVD operatives. He held the rank
of commandant and functioned as immediate aide of ‘Marcos’, whom I had not seen
again after our interview with Rosenberg at the Soviet embassy in Valencia. With
the breeziness of a man who was accustomed to fear and respect, he extended his
hand to me by way of greeting and took a seat with easy
familiarity.
‘Comrade
Hernández, you’ve delayed our work this morning’, he began, in a tone of
admonishment.
‘Pardon
me, my friend Orlov, but I didn’t know what was up – and I still don’t
know.’
‘But
you knew it was our agency that had asked for the warrants of arrest’, he said
in an inquiring tone.
‘I
knew you were one of those who had asked for it, but what I didn’t know was why
and against whom these warrants were asked, and also why you had to by-pass the
ministry.’
‘A
while ago "Marcos" informed me that you understood the nature of our job and
were ready to remove official difficulties for us.’
‘Marcos
told me a story about espionage and I offered, if necessary, to raise the case
inside the Council of Ministers. That was all.’
Orlov
looked at me somewhat ironically and, all the while lighting and extinguishing a
handsome cigarette lighter, he exclaimed: ‘What’s that – the government? Exactly
the contrary. The government must not know a word about it until it has been
finished.’
‘But
what’s it about?’ I asked.
Orlov
was silent for a moment. I lit a cigarette and prepared to
listen.
‘Are
you with our agency?’ he asked.
‘No’.
Orlov made a gesture of surprise. I insisted: ‘Not now or
ever.’
Orlov
lit and extinguished his lighter. ‘I thought you were one of us. But no matter’,
he said between his teeth. Then he began to talk.
Since
a while back (he told me) he had been following the trail of a Falangist spy
ring. POUM elements were mixed up with it. Hundreds of arrests had been made.
The most important figure caught, an engineer named GoIfín, confessed
everything. Nin was seriously compromised, Gorkin, Andrade, Gironella, Arquer,
the whole Trotskyist gang.16 One Roca acted a liaison man between the
POUM and the Falangists in Perpignan. A suitcase full of documents was captured
in Gerona from one Riera. Also a hotel proprietor named Dalmau was convicted and
confessed.17 Everything was ready to strike. I had held it up. The
interior ministry must know nothing. Not even the minister
himself.
‘Tell
me, Orlov, why are you afraid of the ministry’s
intervention?’
‘The
enemy is everywhere’, he replied coldly. And then he added in explanation: ‘From
the beginning we have rejected intervention by the official
police.’
‘But
the interior ministry can’t be unaware of an affair of such importance’, I
said.
‘Zugazagoitia
is a personal friend of some of those who have to be arrested’, he
replied.
‘When
you present all that evidence …’
‘He
will do nothing’, Orlov cut me short. ‘He’s sufficiently
anti-Communist.’
‘In
this case, it’s a question of fighting the enemy and not of pleasing the
Communists.’
‘We’d
run the risk of spoiling everything’, insisted Orlov.
‘In
some way or other he’ll have to be drawn in and it will always be better to
prepare him for it rather than surprise him.’
‘I
know what I’m talking about, Hernández.’
‘And
I know what I’m doing’, I answered.
‘Now
is the ideal moment to deliver an annihilating blow against this gang of
counter-revolutionaries. We have them by the throat’, he said
confidently.
‘I
don’t doubt that you have them by the throat, but I think this whole story will
end in a big political scandal.’
Orlov
looked at me with no little surprise. His lighter sparked but did not
light.
‘What
are you saying? That you don’t believe the story?’
‘That’s
not it exactly, but it’s close to what I’m thinking’, I
declared.
‘We
have a mountain of evidence, crushing evidence.’
‘May
I speak honestly, Orlov?’
Orlov’s
face had hardened. Looking at him straight in the eyes, I hazarded the idea that
was stirring in my head. ‘My impression is that all these proofs are a cleverly
prepared photomontage, but I doubt whether they will stand up in evidence before
a legal tribunal.’
‘We
have the scale-plan which shows the military emplacements of Madrid, identified
by its maker, Golfín. On this plan there is a message written in invisible ink
and addressed to Franco. Do you know who this message is signed by?’ he asked me
in a triumphant tone. ‘By Andrés Nin!’18
I
broke into a spontaneous and natural burst of laughter. ‘What are you laughing
about?’ he asked, annoyed.
‘Man,
you can’t be serious! Please don’t tell such a nonsensical story out there,
because people are just going to have a good laugh. In the whole country you
won’t find a single citizen capable of believing that Nin is such an idiot as to
write messages to Franco in invisible ink – in the era of
radio.’
‘You
don’t believe it?’ he asked angrily.
‘No.’
‘The
you suppose it’s all a lie?’
‘All
– no’, I answered coldly. ‘I think the plan exists, Golfín exists, that you have
statements. I believe in everything divine and human. What I can’t believe is
the simplemindedness of the message.’
‘It’s
Nin’s’, he roared in a rage.
‘I
don’t believe it’, I insisted, serenely.
‘You
don’t believe that he is a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist, a spy, an agent of
Franco?’
‘Whatever
he may be, the one thing he isn’t, because I know him, is an idiot. I’ve had
dealings with more or less all of them, Nin, Andrade, Gorkin,
Maurín19 and the rest, and I don’t believe that they’re capable of
such stupidity.’
‘But
if we have mountains of papers and documents signed and sealed by the POUM!’, he
shouted furiously.
‘Then I
believe it even less.’
Orlov
made an expression of impatience.
‘My
friend Orlov’, I said, ‘let’s talk seriously. You people want to put on a big
trial against the Trotskyists in Spain, as a demonstration of the reason you
shot the opposition in the USSR. I know the Pravda article, of almost two
months ago, in which it was announced that the "purge" begun in Spain will be
carried through with the same vigour as in the Soviet Union.20 So I
understand your interest, perfectly. But let’s not complicate life, which is
already complicated enough. If you wish, we can devote a special page in our
newspapers, every day, to denounce them as a gang of enemies of the people, but
let’s not stage sensational spectacles, because nobody will believe
them.’
‘But
if we have the proofs!’ exclaimed Orlov.
‘If
I know your "apparatus", I’m aware they are able to manufacture dollars out of
wrapping paper.’21
‘That’s
an absurdity – and an impermissible opinion’, muttered Orlov, obviously angry
and upset.
‘If
it upsets you, then consider that I’ve said nothing’, I said
ironically.
‘You
have said, and you are saying, very serious things’, he said
threateningly.
‘You
are a specialist in matters of espionage and counter-espionage? What would you
do with an agent who sent you documents of the greatest importance written on
official stationery, signed with his name and, to cap it all, validated with a
stamp of the GPU?’
He
looked at me a bit perplexed. Rallying, he answered: ‘They don’t have our
techniques or experience.’
‘Almost
all of them are acquainted with illegal work and lived through the underground
period of the Communist Party. If they had committed such a simple indiscretion
as signing their name even on an unimportant communication we would have
expelled them as provocateurs, or as imbeciles. How do you expect me to believe
that in the midst of war they sign documents addressed to
Franco?’
‘We
have the testimony and statements of the arrested men themselves’, he
replied.
‘If
you managed to get these confessions, for me they have no more "legal" value, no
matter how you got them, than the written, signed and sealed
documents.’
‘All
these documents and all these statements will go to the court trial, and there
will be reason enough and evidence enough to hang all of
them.’
‘In
any case, I insist that the procedure be to get an order from the minister to
finish this job. If I’m needed for that, I’m at your
service.’
‘That way, we’ll lose everything’, he grunted in a bad temper.
‘By the way you want, there’ll only be a scandal, a scandal which will damage our party, which is already sufficiently abused.’
‘You promised to help us’, he said, indignantly.
‘I
am ready’, I declared.
‘There’s
no need to go on’, said Orlov. ‘I’ll talk to Jose
Díaz.’22
‘It
seems to me quite proper’, I said, to irritate him, ‘that the secretary of our
party should know what’s going on in Spain.’
Rising,
still holding the lighter, Orlov did not see, or pretended not to see, the hand
I held out to him in farewell.
With
a nod of his head as sole acknowledgement, he went out, a dark expression on his
face.
‘All men are equal’, I told myself, seeing him go out stiffly and elegantly. ‘At
bottom and openly they despise us and try to humiliate us. They act as if they were in a conquered country and behave like lords to serfs.’ [...]
*
I immediately went to the private home of our party’s general secretary. I found
him in bed, surrounded by a litter of medicines. His duodenal ulcer had laid him
down. In a few words I informed him of my interview with Orlov. With that strong
Andalusian accent of his, Díaz confided his thoughts to me in more detail than
ever before. ‘I feel disgusted, disgusted at myself and everything. My faith is
failing.…’ I looked at his wasted, drawn face, where moral suffering and
physical pain had sunk their claws. I felt sorry for this shattered man. It was
a reflection of my own self-pity.
‘I would rather have died than have to survive this spiritual death. I’ve been a
man who gave himself with fanatical enthusiasm to the USSR. You know that I was
a bakery worker. My revolutionary restlessness pushed me towards
anarcho-syndicalism. I joined the action groups because it seemed to me that in
this way I was giving more and sacrificing more for my ideals. I was always
ready to die for what I believed, for what I had faith in. Later the Soviet
Union, Stalin, triumphant socialism, drew me to Communism. I devoted myself with
passion, without reserve, convinced that the USSR was our ideal goal. I would
have sacrificed my wife, my daughter, my parents. I would have killed,
assassinated, to defend Russia, to defend Stalin. And today, what? Everything
crumbles, everything is in ruins at my feet. What purpose does our life have?
I’ve made efforts to convince myself that I’m mistaken, understand? Because I
want to believe, because I can’t admit that everything is a lie. To come to that
conclusion is the end, nothingness.’
He
took two pills out of a bottle and swallowed them with a sip of water. ‘When I
think of all that’, he said. ‘I feel worse.’
‘Pessimism
and despair won’t help us, Pepe’, I said to encourage him.
‘I
know. But the reality crushes my spirit. I can’t help it. These days while I
suffer in bed’, Díaz continued, ‘I’ve permitted myself to think thoroughly about
our situation. The conclusion I arrived at is demoralising. The "tovarichi" boss
the Political Bureau around as they please. I have a feeling that they will try
to get rid of us, you and me, using any of the thousand means at their disposal.
It will not be immediately, because no one – not they in the first place – is
interested in provoking a crisis of leadership through differences with the
method and policies of the USSR. But they will finish with us. It’s a question
of time, and tactics. As for me, using my illness as their excuse, they don’t
even take the trouble to keep me informed about what is taking place in the
leadership. To find out what’s happening I have to call in one comrade or
another, and always it’s the same: "We are doing this because Codovilla directed
it, because Stepanov ordered it, because Togliatti advised
it".’23
‘It’s
more than an invasion, it’s a colonisation’, I said, with an attempt at
levity.
‘The
Kremlin’s sepoys, that’s what we are, sepoys’, he said in
anger.
‘With
apologies to the sepoys!’, I said in the same tone.
‘I
have gone over the whole Central Committee in my mind, and I don’t find more
than half a dozen men capable of taking a firm position at our
side.’
‘Far
fewer’, I observed.
‘A
half dozen against 300,000 members! And against the tradition. And against the
prestige of the Soviet Union’, he added, disheartened.
We
remained silent. The figures weighed on our hearts like lumps of lead. They
crushed us. […]
‘Now
let’s talk about the scheme of Orlov and Company’, Jose Díaz said with a bitter
grimace. ‘What can we do about it?’
‘Little or nothing. I suppose they’ll come to see you. It’s strange they aren’t here
already. What intrigues me is why they now want our collaboration when they’ve
done and undone everything without taking us into account’, I pointed
out.
‘Because they expect a scandal – no other reason. Phone Ortega and tell him that I am
categorically opposed to any intervention in this affair without advance
knowledge by the minister.’
I went to the telephone. Ortega was not in. His secretary informed me that he was
with the minister. After leaving a message that Ortega was to get in touch with
Díaz at his private residence. I asked the secretary if the ‘friends’ had been
there. ‘About an hour ago Ortega was urgently called to the Central Committee by
them’, he answered.
I hung up the receiver with the vague presentiment that we were faced with an
accomplished fact. Orlov could more easily find support from the political
delegation and some other members of the Political Bureau than from Jose Díaz. I
communicated my fears to Díaz. He shared them.
The telephone rang a few minutes later. It was Ortega. I told him of Díaz’s order.
Stammering, embarrassed, he told me he was immediately coming to see
us.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Díaz.
‘What we were afraid of, I think. Ortega is coming now.’
Colonel Ortega appeared five minutes later – an honest man whom we had taken out of the
front lines to take care of the General Security Administration, which was an
extremely important and responsible post under war conditions. He was thin with
an angular face, and kindness and openness were reflected on his thin face. This
man, who had never trembled before the prospect of death when he fought in the
trenches in our struggle, entered José Díaz’s house pale and uneasy. For those
who did not know that we were puppets in a show, the authority of the Political
Bureau was fearful. And now it was the head of the party who was questioning him
with fire darting from his eyes. Ortega felt crushed.
‘A little while ago they called me to the Central Committee’, he explained.
‘Togliatti, Codovilla, Pasionaria and Checa24 were there with Orlov.
They ordered me to teletype to Comrade Burillo (the Assault Guard commandant who
for some weeks had been acting as the head of Public Order in
Barcelona)25 an order for the arrest of Nin, Gorkin, Andrade,
Gironella, Arquer and all other POUM elements indicated by Antonov-Ovsëenko or
Stazhevsky (the first operated in Catalonia as consul and the second as
commercial charge of the USSR).26 The police patrols they are to use
are already in Barcelona.’
A curse rang out explosively. Díaz, furious, jumped out of bed and began to dress.
There was a heavy silence. Ortega looked from one of us to the other without
being able to understand what had happened. He tried to justify himself: ‘I, I
couldn’t suppose ... Since they ordered me ... Besides, Togliatti, Pasionaria,
Checa ... I thought you agreed.’ Neither Díaz nor I said a word. Any explanation
would have revealed more than he guessed, disagreement among the members of the
Political Bureau themselves and our disagreements with the Soviet
delegation.
Minutes afterwards, we were on the street. We took leave of Ortega, jumped into my car
and headed for the headquarters of the Central Committee. A huge rambling
building which occupied one side of the Plaza de Ia Congregación was the
headquarters of the Political Bureau. An armed guard gave us a military salute.
He rang the bell to announce the presence of the general secretary of the party.
We went up to the first floor. Díaz’s personal secretary opened the door of the
office for us. There, sitting before an enormous pitcher of orange drink and in
his shirtsleeves, was Vittorio Codovilla, an Italian by origin and Argentine by
nationality, calmly smoking a small pipe. His enormous corpulence filled the
large desk – of the general secretary of the Communist Party of
Spain.
On the facing wall was a big photograph of Stalin and a nice war poster of Renau.
On the desk there was a mass of papers in disorder. Codovilla threw us a glance
over his small eyeglasses and told us, as if addressing subordinates: ‘One
moment, comrades, just a moment only – I’m finishing.’ Ignoring him, Díaz went
to the telephone and ordered the operator: ‘Tell comrades Pasionaria and Checa
to come down to my office immediately.’
Codovilla looked up at Díaz for a moment. Perhaps he expected or sensed the storm. Our
faces could scarcely be the faces of friends. He picked up his papers and,
taking out an enormous handkerchief, he began to wipe off the stream of sweat
that the day’s heat had brought out on his mammoth neck. ‘Phew, isn’t it hot!’,
he said. There was silence. Turning to Díaz, with the intention of justifying
himself: ‘I asked for you a little while ago and they told me you were in bed.
How hot it gets in my office – yours is much cooler, isn’t it?’
Pasionaria entered, followed by Pedro Checa, the party’s organisational secretary.
Pasionaria theatrically went over to Diaz: ‘How good to see you here! You’re
better?’ I observed her. Her smile was forced and her question was officious.
Pasionaria hated Díaz. She could not forget that he had made some severe
comments on her secret amorous relationship with Francisco Antón, a lad twenty
years younger than she and a prototype of the unscrupulous careerist. [...]
Without taking notice of the fuss that Pasionaria was making over him, Díaz
answered dryly: ‘I’m perfectly well.’
Codovilla filled his pipe, pressing down the tobacco with his finger. The situation was
awkward, tense. Díaz, making an effort to keep calm, asked: ‘Would you like to
tell me whether I have been disqualified from doing work just because I’m ill?’
Pasionaria, with a hypocritical expression on her face: ‘You’re joking,
Pepe?’
‘I’m not in a joking mood. I ask and I want a plain answer.’
‘But what are you getting at?’ Pasionaria asked again, with feigned
ignorance.
‘Who ordered Ortega to send orders for the arrest of the POUM men?’ asked Díaz, going
white with anger on top of his sickbed pallor.
‘We did’, said Pasionaria. ‘There couldn’t be any question of bothering you about
such an unimportant thing. What importance can there be in the arrest by the
police of a handful of provocateurs and spies?’ she asked
malevolently.
‘The POUM arrests are not a police matter, they’re a political matter’, replied
Díaz.
Codovilla smiled with an air of almost sadistic evil. Squeezing the small pipe in both
hands, without losing the arrogant expression on his face, he remarked: ‘Pepe
ought to take a holiday. Overwork and illness have got him excited. Reactions
like this show an oversensitive state of mind. It’s perfectly understandable
that the comrades didn’t want to bother you with foolishness, seeing the state
of your health. The exaggerated interpretation you give such a little business
shows how touchy you’ve become because of your forced withdrawal from work. In
any case I agree that it is necessary to organise the work so that each day you
receive a summary of what has been done and what has been decided by the
comrades. But I insist: you must take a holiday. The rest will do you
good.’
My eyes did not leave the hands of the cynic who pressed the smoking pipe between
them. While he was speaking I thought I could interpret the real meaning of his
words. It was a warning to Díaz to remove himself for a period from the work of
the leadership. The Soviet delegation had begun to take precautionary measures.
‘Then I should watch out for myself’, I thought.
Since I saw Pepe’s chin trembling in agitation and irritation, I intervened lest he
explode in a fit of anger and collapse in a heap. ‘If the arrests of the POUM
men are unimportant, it should have been done legally, that is, by the order of
the proper authority – the government. If it can be proved that they are spies,
then why be afraid that Zugazagoitia would make himself an accomplice of
Franco’s agents? That’s much too serious a matter for a political person to risk
his prestige on it. Zugazagoitia would have neither opposed nor refused to order
the arrests if any of us had brought the evidence to him. The way you’ve gone
about it, it will immediately create a scandal, and justifiably so. That’s what
has made Díaz angry.’
Pasionaria, looking annoyed, glanced around. Checa had been very much affected, and was
biting his fingernails, as he always did when he was nervous. Codovilla answered
curtly: ‘Whatever reasons the comrades of the "special agency" may have had to
act as they did, it isn’t our business. Their activity takes place on the
margins of the party.’
‘Very well!’ cried Díaz. ‘Let them take public responsibility for their actions and
then they will have a right to do what they please. But the scandal falls on us.
Their activity involves the party. And this POUM affair is very
murky.’
Codovilla gave Díaz a vicious look. In a voice that sounded a bit strangled in his throat,
he said: ‘The comrades of the "agency" are doing a big service for the Republic and for the party by unmasking this Counterrevolutionary rubbish. What are you complaining about?’
Defiantly and aggressively Díaz replied: ‘It seems they’re helping themselves more than
us.’
‘That’s the same opinion that Hernández has and it reveals an intolerable hostility
toward the comrades of the GPU’, Codovilla replied
irritably.
‘It’s not true that he has any preconceived hostility towards any comrade from the
"House"’, I explained. ‘Now then, if to express an opinion on this or any other
matter is to be considered hostility, then what is the role of the Political
Bureau? To say yes to everything? To keep quiet and obey?’
Checa, with a depressed expression, spoke hesitantly: ‘No ... I don’t believe that the
situation should be confronted like this.... No, it’s not possible. We ought to unite the Political Bureau, discuss peacefully, clarify things.’
Codovilla went on spitefully: ‘We all maintain discipline and obedience. When you’re a
genuine Communist, without any petty-bourgeois airs or vanity, there are certain
things that are not discussed and not brought up. Hernández and Díaz’s tone and
intentions are offensive. We are advisers – advisers and nothing
more than advisers.’ And the cynic emphasised the word ‘advisers’ as if
he were hitting us with it. He went on: ‘You are the leaders. We have never made
a decision without first consulting with one of you. What decisions have we made
on our own? What decisions have we imposed on you that were not discussed and
decided on by a majority of you? Tell me – which, when?’
His little eyes flashed behind the lenses of his glasses while he continued with his
peroration: ‘Why this insinuation that you only obey? The Political Bureau can’t
be in permanent session, and when a problem comes up we decide it by consulting
the opinion of the comrades who are most available at hand. And it is decided by
common agreement with them. The POUM affair was decided together with Pasionaria
and Checa. At other times we made decisions in consultation with Hernández or
Díaz or some of the other comrades. So be careful about what you say, and about
making reckless statements!’ he wound up in a threatening
tone.
‘In this case the comrades of the "special agency" knew I wasn’t in agreement. They
promised to go see Comrade Díaz and didn’t do it. Why didn’t they inform the
others of our opinion?’
‘Yes,
they informed us’, Pasionaria declared cynically. ‘But since it was urgent and
we couldn’t convene the full Bureau to take up a simple matter, it seemed to us
correct to decide it without waiting any further.’
Codovilla
sweated and smoked. He had calmed down and a sardonic smile played over his
mouth. Pasionaria was acting very well. When Codovilla had talked a moment ago
with such aplomb, he had made sure that the majority of the Political Bureau
would support the delegation against any argument we could put up against the
conduct of the ‘tovarichi’. They had us by the throat.
‘I
think’, said Diaz, ‘that we ought to take up the question at the next meeting of
the Bureau. This question is far too serious to be decided among us.’ Face livid
as a corpse, Díaz rose and abruptly left the office. […]
*
Forty-eight hours later, an urgent call informed me that Negrín was expecting me in his
office. On entering, I found the president dictating into a machine, and without
preamble he asked me: ‘What have you people done with
Nin?’
‘With
Nin? I don’t know what’s happened to Nin’, I said, and it was the
truth.
With evident anger, Negrín explained to me that the minister of the interior had
informed him of a whole series of outrages committed in Barcelona by the Soviet
police, who were acting as if they were on their own territory, without taking
the trouble even out of courtesy to let the Spanish authorities know about the
arrest of Spanish citizens; that they were transferring these prisoners from one
place to another without any authorisation or court order and that they were
locking them up in special prisons entirely outside the control of the legal
authorities; that some of the prisoners had been brought to Valencia but that
Andrés Nin had disappeared. The president of the Generalitat27 had
phoned him, alarmed and indignant, considering that the activity of Orlov and
the GPU in Catalan territory was a violation of the people’s
rights.
I did not know what to answer him. I could have told him that I thought as he did,
as Zugazagoitia, as Companys, that I also wondered where Nin was, and that I
abhorred Orlov and his police gang. But I decided not to. I saw a storm breaking
over our party and I was ready to defend it even in a case where the defence of
the party implicitly involved the defence of a possible
crime.
For some time now I had been trying to convince myself that it was possible to
establish a dividing line which would differentiate our organisation as a party
of Spaniards from the actions of the USSR as a state. My differences were with
the procedures, not with the doctrines; my doubts rose around the men, not
around the principles. The cracks in my faith were limited to the idols, not to
the ideas. With all of my reservations about the policies of the Soviet leaders,
I remained a convinced Communist, a ‘party man’, a fervent believer in the
historic necessity of the Communist movement and, concretely in Spain, of our
party’s mission. The ties which bound us to the USSR’s ‘reasons of state’ and
which so heavily influenced our political actions – we would have to go about
breaking them one after the other till we had completely liberated ourselves
from their tutelage and could go ahead on a national basis, with our conduct
inspired by the interests of the Spanish people and the political, economic,
social and historical realities of Spain. Correct or not, my understanding of
these things then went no further than these propositions.
Negrín persisted: ‘Nin is an ex-councillor of the Generalitat of Catalonia. If any
crime can be proved against him, it must be brought before the Court of
Constitutional Guarantees.’
‘I suppose’, I said, ‘that Nin’s disappearance is due to an excess of zeal on the
part of the "tovarichi" and that they will hold him in one of their jails, but I
don’t think that his life is in any danger. As for the rest, you are the
appropriate person to tell the Soviet ambassador that they should restrain their
proceedings.’
‘And you people too.’
‘We too’, I answered.
Negrín remained thoughtful for a moment. Then, as if talking to himself, he said: ‘In
the Council this afternoon we’ll have a row. Prieto, Irujo28 and
Zugazagoitia will create a scandal. What can I tell them? That I don’t know
anything about it? And you – what will you say? That you don’t know anything
either? The whole thing is stupid.’ Promising him to find out what I could about
the kidnapping of Nin and inform him immediately, I said goodbye and at once
went back to our party’s headquarters.
In Díaz’s office – which remained closed – I found Codovilla and Togliatti. Both of
them looked astonished when I told them my conversation with Negrín. I did not
know whether this reaction was genuine or whether they were acting out a comedy
for my benefit. Codovilla opined that the comrades of the ‘special agency’ must
have held on to Nin in order to question him, or for some other business, before
turning him over to the authorities. Togliatti, tight-lipped, now recovered from
his feigned or real amazement, said nothing. On my insistence that we ought to
know something definite before 4 o’clock in the afternoon, when the meeting of
the Council of Ministers was beginning, he opened his mouth to say that we
should not take the matter so hard, since the comrades of the ‘special agency’
knew what they were doing, were not novices at the job and were political people
before everything else. He promised to go to the embassy to find out what was
going on, and went out to go there. The Soviet embassy was a few minutes away
from the Plaza de la Congregación. I decided to wait. Neither Codovilla nor I
said anything. Each of us had our own reason to be worried. I was a prey to
presentiments of the worst.
Andrés Nin was a prize coveted by the GPU: an intimate and personal friend of the great
leaders of the October Revolution in Russia, he had worked with them since the
foundation of the Red International of Labour Unions, as one of the secretaries
of that organisation. On the death of Lenin he did not hide his sympathies for
Trotsky. The course of Stalinist politics did not convince him, and he expressed
his disagreement publicly. Shortly after the defeat of the Opposition in the
Bolshevik Party, Nin was labelled a renegade and expelled from the Soviet Union.
When the Republic was declared in Spain, he returned to the
country,29 and together with the ex-Communists who had organised the
Workers and Peasants Bloc, he formed the Workers Party of Marxist Unification.
The organ which spoke for this party, La Batalla, was an anti-Stalinist
cry in the stirred-up and revolutionary conditions of
Spain.
The POUM was not a big movement, but the voice of Nin and the majority of its
leaders had undoubtable repercussions in some centres of the Catalan proletariat
and, above all, outside our borders.30 In any case, they worried
Moscow more than they worried us. The moment was propitious. The war permitted
the GPU to operate freely in Republican Spain and Orlov’s men had set up a
police apparatus as if they were ruling conquered
territory.
The witchhunt against the POUMists was carried out in order to show that both inside
and outside Russia the friends of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, etc.
were a gang of counterrevolutionaries, agents of fascism, enemies of the people,
and traitors to the fatherland, who had to be shot in whatever country or
region. And also in order that the suspicious should put aside their objections.
It was not Stalin’s personal phobia that caused the extermination of the old
guard – the case of Spain proved it. Here, in a democratic country, ruled by a
Popular Front, here too they were being unmasked and executed as traitors. I
grasped the political ‘motive’ easily. What I didn’t imagine – I was not long in
finding out – was the criminal lengths to which the GPU’s henchmen were capable
of going in the struggle against the men of the ideological
opposition.
From the balcony I saw Togliatti’s car approaching. A moment later he told us he had
been able to find nothing at the embassy, neither Nin’s whereabouts nor Orlov’s.
All my nervousness and worries broke out in anger. I announced that I would not
attend the Council of Ministers, that I did not want to be a punchbag for Orlov
and Co. over an issue that had seemed improper and shady to me from the
beginning.
‘Not to show up, to dodge the debate, that would be the greatest stupidity. Let’s
evade the concrete case of Nin and base ourselves on the existence of the
evidence which shows that the POUM leaders were in contact with the enemy. Let’s
not make our stand on their ground; let’s set the debate around the existence or
non-existence of a spy organisation. Once it is shown, as it is possible to
show, that this exists, the scandal over the whereabouts of Nin will die down.
And when Nin appears he will already be accused of treason.’ From Togliatti’s
explanation I deduced that he already knew Orlov’s whole scheme and that his
visit to the embassy had not been an idle one. Nin was being held, and they
would turn him over when the ‘affair’ took on an official status. Some of my
fears were dissipated. And although Togliatti’s plan did not please me very
much, I was ready to follow it at the ministers’ meeting. ‘In the end’, I told
myself, ‘the courts will be charged with establishing what is true or not in
this whole GPU plot.’
At four o’clock the ministerial cars began to arrive at the grey building of the
Presidency. The newspapermen accosted the ministers in the waiting room hung
with musty, dull, peeling velvet. ‘What do you know about Andrés Nin?’, one of
them asked me. With an evasive gesture, I avoided a reply and entered the
council chamber.
On the oval table where ministerial meetings took place, there were walnut
cigarette cases, chocolate boxes, jugs of water, wide pads of paper and bulky
leather portfolios. The frowns of several ministers gave warning of a storm to
come.
When the president opened the meeting, the minister of the interior, Zugazagoitia,
asked for the floor. With unanswerable logic and firm arguments, correct
in form, Zugazagoitia told what he knew about the ‘case of Nin’ and his
comrades, ‘arrested not by the authorities of the Republic but by an "outside
agency" which operates, as we have seen, in our territory in all kinds of ways,
without any law other than its will, without any restraint other than its own
whim. I would like to know’, he concluded, ‘if my jurisdiction as minister of
the interior is determined by the responsibilities of my post or by the
standards of certain Soviet "technicians". Our gratitude to this friendly
country should not force us to leave our personal and national dignity in shreds
at the crossroads of its policies’.
Prieto spoke. And Irujo. Their speeches were an angry protest against Soviet
intervention and oppression in our land. Their dignity as men and Spaniards
revolted against the outrages of the ‘tovarichi’ who, in exchange for providing
arms, thought they had a right to humiliate us and even to rule over us. In
their speeches they declared that they would resign before becoming ‘stooges’.
Velao spoke and Giner de los Ríos.31 All of them spoke. They demanded
Nin, and called for the dismissal of Colonel Ortega, who was a visible and
direct accomplice, though an unconscious one, in Orlov’s
abuses.
Then we, the two Communist ministers, spoke.32 Our arguments were poor and
colourless. No one believed in our sincerity when we said we did not know Andrés
Nin’s whereabouts. We defended the presence of the Soviet ‘technicians’ and
‘advisers’ as the expression of the ‘disinterested’ and ‘fraternal’ aid which
the Russians gave us and which had been accepted by previous governments. We
once again explained what the USSR’s provision of arms meant for our war and
about the support on the international scene that the Soviet Union gave to
us.
Since, in spite of everything, the atmosphere stayed hostile and brows remained
frowning, I gave in on the dismissal of Colonel Ortega – the sacrificial goat –
for exceeding his authority and failing to inform the ministry in due time, but
I threatened that all the compromising documents of the POUM would be made
public and also the names of those inside and outside the government who
protected the spies of that party ‘over mere questions of procedure’. It was a
demagogic and disloyal expedient, but I did not hesitate to use
it.
Negrín, conciliatory, proposed to the council that it suspend the debate until all the
facts were known and it had the evidence of which the Communist ministers spoke,
waiting till the Ministry of the Interior could give us definite information on
Andrés Nin’s whereabouts. We had weathered the first storm, the most dangerous
one. Going out of the council chamber, Uribe told me: ‘You were very clever in
that combination of concessions and threats.’ My Pyrrhic victory gave me such
nausea that I wanted to vomit. [...]
*
It was another two or three days before we knew anything definite about Andrés Nin.
Our Madrid organisation informed us that Nin was in Alcalá de Henares, in a
private prison that Orlov and his gang used. When we raised the question with
the Soviet delegation, they thereupon told us that indeed – what a coincidence!
– they had just received news that Nin had passed through Valencia,
without stopping, in the direction of Madrid; that Orlov was thinking of taking
him directly to the Prisión Celular in Madrid, but that he was afraid of
an escape by the accused and chose to put him into jail at his headquarters in
Alcalá pending the arrival of the other people arrested, who were to be moved
from the Valencia jail to the one in Madrid.
As Díaz and I had foreseen, the political scandal around the arrest of the POUM
leaders turned into a bitter political struggle against our party and against
Negrín himself. Socialists, Caballerists, Anarchists, trade unionists and also,
although more weakly, Republicans joined in denouncing before national and
foreign public opinion the attack on the rights of the people and the democratic
laws of the country, and the illegal arrest of Nin, Andrade, Gorkin, Arquer,
Bonet33 and the other POUM leaders. All of them demanded the
immediate freeing of the prisoners and, as a slogan, raised the question: ‘Where
is Nin?’
Our press unleashed a furious attack against the POUM and all its political
advocates. Nevertheless, It was necessary to give ‘evidence’ of the prisoners’
guilt in order to silence the outcry. Now it was the Political Bureau that
demanded the documents showing the guilt of the POUMists, in order to make them
public and calm the storm that had broken out over the head of our
party.
One day during this time, on visiting Negrín, I could see on the president’s table a
pile of telegrams from all parts of the world asking the government where Nin
was and protesting against the arrest of the POUM leaders. Negrín asked us for a
solution which could put an end to this discrediting of his government inside
and outside the national frontiers. ‘There is no remedy other than for the
government to take into its own hands responsibility for the trial against the
POUM. By giving it official status, there will be an end to the attacks on the
GPU as author of this "affair" behind the back of the Spanish authorities, which
is the strong point of all the protests’, I advised
Negrín.
‘Why should I compromise the whole government in this troublesome case?’ Negrín
protested.
‘Because at times, against one’s wish, one is obliged to sweat through another man’s
fever.’
I do not know what arguments Negrín used to convince Irujo, the minister of
justice, a Basque Catholic, who had little fondness for the Communists and was
frankly opposed to playing along with the GPU. But the day after this
conversation an official communiqué of the Ministry of Justice appeared in the
press, announcing the indictment of the POUM leaders, together with some
Falangists headed by the engineer Golfín, maker of the scale-plan drawn up for
Franco, a plan which showed the fixed military emplacements of the capital, all
of which constituted a criminal act of espionage and high treason. While the
printing presses of the daily papers were running off the official communiqué of
the Ministry of Justice, the treacherous hand of Orlov consummated one of the
vilest crimes in the annals of political criminality in our history: Nin was
assassinated by the henchmen of Stalin’s GPU.
The crime against Andrés Nin was not only the responsibility of the material authors
of the deed; it was also the responsibility of all of us who, though able to
prevent it, by submission to or fear of Moscow facilitated it by our behaviour.
Afterwards, consciousness of our complicity silenced our tongues or, as in our
case, added infamy to crime. The walls of Spain were covered with questions
painted by underground brushes at the risk of life: ‘Where is Nin?’ And, in
order to cover up, our hordes of Agit-Props wrote, underneath, the bloody
slander: ‘In Salamanca or Berlin.’34
Did the president know where Andrés Nin was confined? Did the minister of the
interior know? Did the minister of justice know? If we take the testimony of one
of the defendants, Julián Gorkin, in his book Canibales politicos,35
on page 159 we find the following conversation with Garmendia, the
inspector general of the Madrid prisons, who belonged to the Basque Catholic
party and was a personal friend of the minister of justice, Manuel Irujo, and
had been assigned by the government to move the POUM prisoners from Madrid to
Valencia. This is what he says:
I took (Garmendia) aside and we held an interesting conversation. ‘Have no fear’,
he said. ‘You will get to Valencia alive. I’ve promised that to the government.
An Assault Guard captain in whom I have the fullest confidence, in command of
fifty men, will accompany you. They will be along not to watch you but to
protect you.’ He showed great interest in getting acquainted with our political
positions. Afterwards he told me in a sincere voice: ‘I am entirely acquainted
with your case. I don’t think anything will happen to you people. The minister
of justice is ready to resign before permitting a political crime against you.’
I asked him about Andrés Nin. He confided in me: ‘The government ordered me to
discover his whereabouts. Right now I am getting in my car and will stop at the
very gate of the building that holds him. But to rescue him I would need a
military force such as the government refuses to put at my disposal.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It
fears the consequences perhaps. I would have to engage in a real battle with
other military forces. Perhaps you don’t suspect everything that lies behind the
POUM affair.’
If this account is true, the government could have rescued Nin and did not want to,
or did not dare to. I am inclined to believe that it did not dare to. The more
weight Soviet ‘aid’ had in the wishes of the ministers, the more Stalin’s police
agents in Spain acted with audacity and impudence.
*
Andrés Nin, the old friend of Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky, was assassinated in
Spain by the same hand that, in Russia, had physically exterminated the
Bolshevik old guard. Here is how the crime was
perpetrated.
Orlov and his gang imprisoned Nin with the aim of wresting from him a ‘voluntary’
confession, admitting his role as a spy in the service of Franco. As
executioners experienced In the art of ‘breaking’ political prisoners to get
‘spontaneous’ confessions, they thought that in Andrés Nin, given his
ill-health, they had found the right material to provide Stalin with a
gratifying success. The interrogation took place for days that went on without
any night, without beginning or end, for ten and twenty and forty hours at a
time uninterruptedly. The person from whom these facts came had abundant reason
to be well informed about it. He was one of Orlov’s most trusted aides, the same
one who later was able to tell me of the plan to assassinate lndalecio
Prieto.36
In the case of Nin, Orlov began by using the ‘dry’ method: a relentless bombardment
for hours and hours with ‘Confess’, ‘Make a statement’, ‘Admit’, ‘It’s in your
interests’, ‘You can save yourself’, ‘It’s better for you’, alternating ‘advice’
with threats and abuse. It is a scientific method which tends to exhaust
the prisoner’s mental energy and demoralise him. Physical fatigue will overcome
him, lack of sleep dulls the senses and nervous tension destroys him. Thus his
will is undermined and his integrity broken. They keep the prisoner on his feet
for whole hours, without letting him sit down, till he collapses in a heap from
unbearable pain in the kidneys. When it gets to this point, the body feels
frightfully heavy and the cervical vertebrae refuse to support the head. The
whole spinal column feels as if split into pieces. The feet swell up and a
mortal weariness weighs upon the prisoner, who wants nothing except to get a
moment’s rest, to close his eyes for an instant, to forget that he exists and
that the world exists. When it is physically impossible to continue the
‘interrogation’, it is suspended. The prisoner is dragged to his cell. He is
left alone for a few minutes, enough for him to recover his mental equilibrium a
little and begin to become conscious of dreading the continuation of the
monotonous ‘interrogation’, which is always the same in its questions and in its
callous disregard of any replies that do not admit full guilt. Twenty or thirty
minutes of rest are enough. No more than that is granted.
And once again the session resumes. Again the ‘advice’, again the hours without
measure in which each minute is an eternity of suffering and fatigue, of moral
and physical weariness. The prisoner ends by collapsing, body invertebrate.
Finally he neither discusses nor defends himself, he ceases to think, all he
wants is to be left alone to sleep, to rest, to sit. And the days and nights
follow each other, with time implacably at a standstill. Discouragement
overpowers the prisoner; his will fails him. He knows that it is impossible to
escape with his life from the clutches of his torturers, and his yearning
concentrates on an unrestrainable desire to be left to live his last hours in
peace or be finished off immediately. ‘They want me to say yes? Maybe if I admit
guilt they will kill me right away.’ And this idea begins to eat away at the
man’s integrity.
Andrés Nin put up incredible resistance. In him there appeared no symptoms of the moral
and physical collapse which brought some of the most outstanding collaborators
of Lenin to an extraordinary abdication of their revolutionary will and
firmness, to the absurd thought that ‘Stalin is a traitor, but Stalin is not the
revolution, nor is he the party, and since my death is inevitable, I will make
the ultimate sacrifice for my people and my ideals by declaring myself a
counterrevolutionary and a criminal, so that the revolution might live’! With
what astonishment the whole world heard these great men of the Russian
revolution abjectly defame themselves, without opening their mouth for a single
word of condemnation for the strangler of that same revolution that their
silence was intended to save! There has been talk of special drugs of which the
Russian police possess the secret. I do not believe in such a story. If I did
not accept the crazy idea of ‘serving the revolution’ in articulo mortis,
I would believe indeed in the workings of certain human considerations which
bring a man who knows that he is definitely lost to try to save his children or
his wife or his parents from the tyrant’s vengeance, in exchange for his
‘confession’.
Nin did not capitulate. He resisted, to their dismay. His torturers grew impatient.
They decided to abandon the ‘dry’ method. Now came the living blood, the rended
flesh, the twisted muscles, which would put to the test the man’s integrity and
capacity for physical resistance. Nin bore up under the cruelty of the torment
and the pain of refined torture. At the end of a few days his human shape had
been turned into a formless mass of swollen flesh.
Orlov, in a frenzy, crazed by the fear of failure – a failure which could mean his own
liquidation – slavered over with rage against this sick man who agonised without
‘confessing’, without implicating himself or seeking to implicate his party
comrades who, at a single word from him, would have been stood up against the
wall for execution, to the joy and heart-felt satisfaction of all the
Russians.
Nin’s life was wiped out. In the streets of loyalist Spain and all over the world, the
mounting campaign demanded to know where he was and called for his liberation.
The situation could not go on much longer. To turn him over alive meant a double
load of scandal. Everyone would be able to verify the dreadful physical tortures
to which he had been subjected and, what was even more dangerous, Nin could
denounce the whole infamous scheme prepared by Stalin’s henchmen in Spain. And
the torturers decided to finish with him.
Professional criminals would think it through as follows: ‘Should we finish him off and throw him in a ditch? Assassinate and bury him? Burn the body and scatter the ashes to
the winds?’ Any of these methods would have got rid of Nin, but the GPU would
not have freed itself from responsibility for the crime, since it was notorious
and public that it was the perpetrator of the kidnapping. It was therefore
necessary to look for a method which, at one and the same time, would relieve
the GPU of the responsibility for Nin’s ‘disappearance’ and also incriminate
him, by showing his relation with the enemy.
The solution, it seems, came to the brutalised mentality of one of Orlov’s most
inhuman collaborators, ‘Commandant Carlos’ (Vittorio Vidali, as he is called in
Italy, or Arturo Sermenti and Carlos Contreras, as he was and is called in
Mexico and Spain).37 His plan was the following: to fake an abduction
by Gestapo agents disguised as International Brigaders, an attack on the
Alcalá building, and a new ‘disappearance’ of Nin. It would then be said that
the Nazis had ‘liberated’ him, which would show the contacts that Nin had with
national and international fascism.38 Meanwhile Nin would be made to
disappear permanently, and, in order to leave no trace, his body would be thrown
into the sea.39 This infamous trick would be a crude one, but it
offered a way out.
One day the two guards who watched the prison of Alcalá de Henares (two Communists
who carried Socialist membership cards) were found tied up; they declared that a
group of about ten soldiers of the International Brigade, speaking German, had
attacked the house, disarmed and bound them, opened the prison cell and carried
Nin away in a car. To give a greater appearance of realism to this sinister
melodrama, thrown away on the floor where Nin had lived was found his wallet
with a number of documents which showed his relations with the German spy
service. So that nothing should be wanting, there were found also some German
mark notes.
Three questions are enough to lay bare the infamous lie embodied in this tale invented
by Orlov’s gang.
If the writing on the back of the engineer Golfín’s scale-plan matched Nin’s
handwriting, why not turn it over to the authorities together with the
evidence? 40 For what reason was it decided
otherwise?
If Nin was brutally tortured in order to wrest from him a confession that would
implicate him, how can it be explained that the GPU failed to spot a wallet full
of espionage evidence, which later shows up on the floor of the cell, and why
did it not occur to Nin to destroy this evidence?
If the prison-house at Alcalá des Henares was so well guarded that Garmendia, the
inspector general of the Madrid prisons, declared that he dared not rescue Nin
from jail because the government refused to give him the necessary forces, since
he would have to engage in a battle with the Russians, then how could it be that
only eight or ten men attacked it quietly, without firing a shot, made their way
with impunity to the guards, overpowered them and carried away the
prisoner?
Through the account of the man who had direct contact with Orlov, it was possible much
later to reconstruct the facts. But the day after the consummation of the crime
I was fully convinced that Andrés Nin had been assassinated. Comrade X let me
know that she had transmitted a message to Moscow which said: ‘A.N. affair
settled by method A.’ The initials coincide with Andrés Nin’s. What could
‘method A’ be? The absurd account of the ‘abduction’ by Gestapo agents pointed
to the GPU’s crime. Then ‘A’, in the Soviet delegation’s code, stood for death.
If this were not the case, the delegation – that is, Togliatti, Stepanov,
Codovilla, Gueré,41 etc. – would have transmitted something less than
‘affair settled’.
The trial which followed against the rest of the POUM leaders was a crude farce
based on forged papers and statements wrenched out of the miserable Franco
spies, who got promises that their lives would be spared (they were later shot)
if they declared that they had been in contact with the POUM people. The
magistrates and judges condemned them because they had to condemn them and were
ordered to condemn them. The ‘evidence’ which W. Roces42 had a very
active part in ‘elaborating’ documentarily, turned out so hollow and false that
none of them could be put up against the wall for execution (in spite of the
fact that a hook was published with all the documents of the supposed espionage,
a book for which José Bergamín wrote the preface).43 some of the
defendants were set free and others sentenced to no more than 15 years ‘because
of the defendants’ participation in the Anarchist-POUM rising of 5 May 1937 in
Barcelona’, a movement in which the POUM had never denied its
participation.44 The fall of Catalonia brought about the release of
all the prisoners.45
1. This was in early December 1936. Cimorra was Hernández’s
secretary.
2. Marcel Rosenberg was the Soviet ambassador to Spain. In 1937 he was recalled to
the USSR and executed.
3. Abram Slutsky became head of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate of the NKVD
(People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in 1934. He died in the Soviet
Union in 1938. Although the official cause of death was a heart attack it seems
likely that Stalin had him poisoned.
4. The NKVD in fact had a range of responsibilities in the sphere of state
security. The political police was therefore often referred to by its earlier
name, GPU (State Political Directorate).
5. In November 1936, when Madrid was under threat from Franco’s forces, the
Republican government was removed to Valencia, as was the Soviet
embassy.
6. The ‘House’ was the Kremlin.
7. As a
young Communist in 1923, Hernández had been involved in an attempt to blow up
Socialist Party (PSOE) leader Indalecio Prieto. In September 1936 both Hernández
and Prieto became ministers in the Popular Front
government.
8. The Falange was the Spanish fascist party, founded in 1933. In April 1937 Franco
issued a decree compulsorily incorporating all political parties supporting the
Nationalist cause into the Falange.
9. Orlov was the head of the NKVD Foreign Intelligence Directorate in Spain, while
Bielov was another NKVD operative. It has been argued that this Orlov was not
the Alexander Orlov who later defected to the USA and published the book The
Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes (see Elizabeth Poretsky, Our Own
People, 1969, p.259). However it now seems clear that they were one and the
same person.
10. Francisco Largo Caballero was the leader of the left wing of the PSOE, Prieto
being the leader of the right wing. Largo Caballero became prime minister in the
Popular Front government formed in September 1936. He was deposed in May 1937 by
a coalition of Communists, right-wing Socialists and bourgeois Republicans after
he opposed the illegalisation of the POUM. In 1938 he appeared as a witness for
the defence in the trial of the POUM leaders.
11. After the fall of Largo Caballero, a new government was formed under Juan
Negrín, a leading figure in the Prieto wing of the PSOE.
12. Julián Zugazagoitia was a supporter of the PSOE right wing. Despite this, he
also appeared as a witness for the defence in the trial of the POUM. Living in
exile in France after the defeat of the Republic, he was handed over to Franco
in 1940 and executed.
13. Antonio Ortega was a relatively recent recruit to the Communist Party who had been appointed director-general of security at the time of the formation of the Negrín government. After the fall of the Republic he was captured by the Nationalists and shot.
14. Hernández’s memory is in error here. The Negrín cabinet was formed in May 1937, while the conversation with Ortega must have taken place on 12 June.
15. It has been argued that Hernández’s description does not fit Alexander Orlov.
Burnett Bulloten has written that Orlov was ‘more than a foot shorter ... and
somewhat corpulent. He is neither elegant nor distinguished looking’ (The
Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, 1991, p.363). But this
was some decades later. Photographs from the 1930s in John Costello and Oleg
Tsarev, Dangerous Illusions, 1993, show an elegantly dressed Orlov who
was far from corpulent. Hernández would appear to be mistaken only on the matter
of Orlov’s height.
16.
Julian Gorkin, Juan Andrade, Gironella (Enrique Adroher) and Jordi Arquer were
leading members of the POUM. They were all arrested and imprisoned in June
1937.
17. Ramón Xifra Riera was said to be the Falangist chief of espionage in Perpignan.
Javier Fernando Golfín, Joaquín Roca and Cosme Dalmau were all genuine Falangist
spies. For their part in the frame-up of the POUM, see Hugh Thomas, The
Spanish Civil War, 1977, p.702.
18. It seems that Hernández is wrong in stating that the NKVD claimed Nin had signed
the message to Franco written in invisible ink on the back of Golfín’s map.
Judging by the excerpts published in Georges Soria, Trotskyism in the Service
of Franco: A Documentary Record of Treachery by the POUM in Spain, 1938,
pp.9-10, the author of the forged letter to Franco was supposed to be a
Falangist agent in contact with the POUM leaders. He relayed the information
that ‘N. asks that you should arrange that I should be the only person to
communicate with them ... ’.
19. Joaquín Maurín was the POUM’s single deputy in the Spanish parliament, having
been elected in February 1936 as part of the Popular Front bloc. Maurín was
caught behind the Nationalist lines during the July 1936 military rebellion and
imprisoned. He was released in 1946 and lived in exile until his death in
1972.
20. ‘So far as Catalonia is concerned, the cleaning up of the Trotskyists and
Anarchists has begun and it will be carried out with the same energy as in the
USSR.’ This statement is usually attributed to the 17 December 1936 issue of
Pravda. The quotation appeared in the Mexican newspaper Universal
Gráfico and was reprinted by the POUM in the 5 January 1937 issue of La
Batalla. However, although it is anticipates accurately enough Moscow’s
subsequent actions, no such statement appeared in Pravda. See Bulloten,
Spanish Civil War, pp.414, 864.
21.
A sarcastic reference to an alleged Soviet plot to circulate forged dollar
bills.
22. José Díaz had replaced José Bullejos as PCE general secretary in 1933 after the
latter was purged for opposing the Comintern’s then ultra-leftist policies. Díaz
left Spain in 1938 to go to the Soviet Union for treatment for his stomach
ulcers, which turned out to be cancer. He died in 1942 after falling from a
window in Tiflis. The official verdict was suicide, though it is possible that
he was murdered.
23. Vittorio Codovilla, Stepanov (a Bulgarian whose real name was S. Mineff) and the
Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti were all Comintern representatives in
Spain. Togliatti would subsequently claim that he did not arrive in Spain until
July 1937, but he had obvious reasons for denying that he was present at the
time of the POUM’s suppression and Nin’s murder.
24. Dolores Ibárruri was known as ‘Pasionaria’ because of her emotional oratory. She
succeeded Díaz as PCE secretary and remained an important figurehead for the
party until her death in 1989. Pedro Checa was organisation secretary of the
PCE. He died in exile in the Soviet Union in the early
1940s.
25. Colonel Ricardo Burillo, a Communist sympathiser, was appointed director-general of
security in Catalonia following the May Days in Barcelona (see note 44 below).
On 16 June the POUM headquarters, the Hotel Falcón, was closed down on Burillo’s
orders and immediately turned into a prison.
26. During the October Revolution, Vladimir Antonov-Ovsëenko had organised the
seizure of the Winter Palace. Although he supported the Left Opposition in the
CPSU he later capitulated to Stalin. Antonov-Ovsëenko arrived in Barcelona as
Soviet consul in August 1936. He was recalled to the Soviet Union in June 1937
and executed. The commercial official Arthur Stashevsky suffered the same
fate.
27. The Generalitat was the regional government of Catalonia. Its president was Luis
Companys.
28.
Manual Irujo was a Basque nationalist politician who had been a minister in the
Republican government since September 1936.
29. Nin in fact had to fight for the right to leave the Soviet Union (see Victor
Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1967, p.276). He returned to Spain in
1930, the year before the declaration of the Republic.
30. At its foundation in 1935 the POUM had a membership of 7,000, rising to 40,000
during the first months of the Civil War. Its base was in Catalonia, reflecting
the fact that the BOC, the main component in the 1935 unification, was an
exclusively Catalan organisation. The POUM’s international links were with the
‘London Bureau’, whose affiliates included the Independent Labour Party of
Britain.
31. Antonio Velao and Bernardo Giner de los Ríos were bourgeois Republican ministers in the Popular Front government.
32. The other Communist in Negrín’s cabinet was Vicente Uribe, the minister of
agriculture.
33. Pedro Bonet, who was in charge of the POUM’s trade union work, was another of
the arrested leaders.
34. That is, in the capitals of Nationalist Spain or Nazi
Germany.
35. Gorkin’s Cannibales politicos: Hitler y Stalin en España was published in
Mexico in 1941. A revised version was published in 1974 as El proceso de
Moscú en Barcelona.
36.
Although the PCE had supported Prieto at the time of the struggle against Largo
Caballero, he later came into conflict with the Communists. According to
Hernández, the NKVD planned to have Prieto assassinated.
37. Vittorio Vidali was an Italian Communist who had been a Comintern representative
in Mexico, where he was implicated in the murder of the dissident Cuban
Communist leader Julio Antonio Mella. In Spain he became political commissar of
the Communists’ Fifth Regiment. In post-war Italy he was for many years a
leading figure in the Communist Party in Trieste.
38. This was the explanation of Nin’s disappearance that Negrín relayed to Manuel
Azaña, the President of the Republic, who expressed understandable scepticism at
this ‘novelesque’ story. See Thomas, Spanish Civil War,
p.706.
39. For the likely location of Nin’s body, see introduction,
above.
40. See note 18 above.
41. ‘Gueré’ was the Hungarian Erno Gerö, another Comintern agent in Spain. According
to Orlov’s letter in the KGB archives, he was present during the torture of
Nin.
42.
Wenceslao Roces had been Hernández’s undersecretary of
education.
43. This is a reference to the book Espionaje en España, which was published
in Spain and France just before the trial of the POUM leaders in June 1938. The
author was one ‘Max Rieger’, who according to the PCE was an International
Brigader. José Bergamín was a Catholic intellectual and a Communist fellow
traveller. In his preface to the book Bergamín stated that the POUM was an
espionage organisation linked with international fascism.
44. In May 1936 the Stalinist police chief in Barcelona, a former BOC member named
Rodríguez Salas, tried to take over the city’s telephone exchange, which was
controlled by a workers’ committee. This action was part of a campaign to
eradicate the forms of dual power established in July-August 1936 and reassert
the authority of the bourgeois state. It provoked a spontaneous working class
revolt in Barcelona, in the course of which 500 people were killed and 1,000
injured. Contrary to Communist mythology about an attempted POUM/Anarchist
coup d’état (see Nan Green and A.M. Elliott, Spain Against Fascism,
1936-39 (Our History, No.67), 1976, p.20), neither the POUM nor the
Anarchists attempted to seize power but concentrated on negotiating a peaceful
settlement. As a result the Barcelona workers were defeated and a Stalinist
pogrom unleashed against the POUM and the Anarchist left
wing.
45. For an account of the POUM prisoners’ escape, see The Spanish Civil War: The
View from the Left (Revolutionary History, Vol.4 Nos.1/2), 1992,
pp.303-13.