We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Born in Kiev in 1898, the son of a Jewish artisan, Mikhail Efimovich Friedland Koltsov was to attain immense popularity in Soviet Russia. As a young man, he had left the Ukraine to study for a degree in medicine at the University of St Petersburg, but the outbreak of the Russian Revolution had seen him swept into politics. He took part in the Russian Civil War, producing political propaganda for the Red Army’s Okna Yug ROSTA, an information bulletin on the southern front. He joined the Communist Party in 1918 with a letter of recommendation signed by both Trotsky and the old Bolshevik Anatoly Lunacharsky, and participated in the repression of the sailors’ revolt at Kronstadt in March 1921. Thereafter he became a prominent journalist. He was also an aviator who had taken part in long-distance flights, the most celebrated of which had opened up the route Moscow-Ankara-Teheran-Kabul. In 1931, he published the book Khochu letat’ (I want to fly). He was an important pioneer in the nascent Soviet aircraft industry, participating in the fund-raising for construction of the gigantic aircraft ‘Maxim Gorki’. He wrote colourfully realistic articles about his flying exploits, about his experiences as a taxi-driver and about his long journeys through Asia and Europe.1 He believed that a journalist should see, feel and participate in everything he wrote about. From an early stage, his journalistic and literary work was larded with accounts of his own intrepid adventures. A tendency to self-publicity would accompany him throughout his career and may well have contributed to his ultimate fate.

  Koltsov’s political activities in the 1920s also contained the seeds of subsequent problems. He was a member of the left Opposition and the protégé of Lev Sosnovsky, an old Bolshevik, a close associate of Karl Radek and himself a gifted journalist. He joined the staff of Pravda in 1922 at the invitation of Lenin’s sister, Maria Ulianova, one of the paper’s senior editors. In 1923, to Stalin’s annoyance, he had published a photo-montage ‘A Day in the Life of Trotsky’ in the magazine Ogonyok. After the deportation in 1927 of Leon Trotsky, Sosnovsky courageously bore the banner of his friend, an example not followed by Koltsov. When Sosnovsky was arrested in 1928, Koltsov quickly dissociated himself from his erstwhile mentor, which earned him a public slapping in the foyer of the Bolshoi Theatre from Sosnovsky’s mistress, Olga.2 Koltsov participated in Stalin’s fiftieth-birthday celebrations in 1929 with a panegyric comparing him to Lenin.3 Having reneged on his past, Koltsov quickly acquired considerable celebrity in the world of the Soviet press. He became editor of a host of journals – Ogonyok (1928–39), Krokodil (1934–38), Chudak (1928–30), Za rubezhom (1932–38), among others. He became acquainted with the top brass of the NKVD. Sofia Prokofieva, a colleague at Ogonyok, introduced him to her husband Georgi Prokofiev, deputy to the chief of the NKVD, Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda. He also knew Yagoda’s successor, the vicious Nikolai Yezhov, by dint of attending the literary salon run by his wife Yevgenia. He rose to be head of the powerful Soviet magazine and newspaper association, making him one of the most influential men in Soviet cultural policy of the 1930s. Moreover, as chairman of the foreign committee of the Soviet Writers’ Union, he held a key function in propagating the policies of the Popular Front.4 Trotsky never forgave his conversion to Stalinism but Koltsov would never be free of the taint of Trotskyism.

  Despite his growing pre-eminence in the literary world, Koltsov always retained a thirst for action. At the funeral of the great poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky who had died on 14 April 1930, Koltsov volunteered to drive the hearse. It had been announced that Mayakovsky had committed suicide over a failed love affair. Certainly, he was demoralized and disillusioned by the drift of Soviet politics, but it was whispered by some that he had been murdered by the security services because of his increasingly individualistic writings. A huge crowd gathered to pay homage, walking behind the cortège as it drew away from the Writers’ Union. However, Koltsov drove too fast, and lost the crowd. It is to be assumed that this was as a result of the impetuousness of the one-time taxi-driver rather than an official ploy to diminish the size of the popular homage to Mayakovsky and thus limit the negative publicity of his untimely death.5

  A Moscow acquaintance, Paulina Abramson, then seventeen years old, met Koltsov in 1932 in the Soviet Embassy in Berlin and remembered him as ‘of small stature, quite plump peering through thick-lensed spectacles’. The approbation with which he eyed her made it obvious that he was something of a womanizer.6 Certainly, he was the very antithesis of a grey and dour apparatchik. An indication of Koltsov’s boyish and irreverent style was given by the Hungarian Arthur Koestler. He recounted an episode in Paris in 1935 involving Koltsov, Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and Aleksander Rado, a clandestine agent of Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU. They were in Paris for some international diplomatic conference at which Litvinov was heading the Russian delegation and Rado attending under his cover as Paris representative of the Impress Bureau (Soviet Independent News Service). Koltsov arrived late for his meeting with Koestler: ‘“Forgive me,” he said with his pale smile, “but I have a good excuse. I have been to a cinema.” “At lunch-time?” I asked, surprised at such frivolity. “Yes, we were very naughty. We were playing truant. You will never guess who else.” I didn’t. The other two lunch-hour movie visitors had been Litvinov, incognito, and Alex Rado.’ Interestingly, if Paulina Abramson remembered him as plump in 1932, by the time that they met in 1935, Koestler would describe him as ‘a short, thin, insignificant-looking man, with a quiet manner and pale eyes’.7 His weight loss could have been a reflection of the anxieties induced in an ex-member of the left opposition by the increasingly oppressive atmosphere in the Soviet Union.

  That Koltsov was deeply uncomfortable about the turn of events in the USSR was immediately obvious to the German writer Gustav Regler, who visited him at this time. Regler was horrified to find the Moscow bookshops full of outpourings from exiles and from children which he likened to ‘the stammerings of terrified lackeys’. He protested to Koltsov about the stultifying atmosphere in Russia, which was turning stormy petrels into parrots. An embarrassed Koltsov told him of a recent decree, whereby destitute children had ceased to exist and were to be put in camps, and laying down that children from the age of twelve could be shot. Clearly appalled and ashamed, Koltsov said: ‘Why don’t you console yourself with the thought of the good that has been achieved? Or why don’t you simply tell yourself that I’m exaggerating, that even if the decree exists it isn’t being implemented, that no Russian would dream of shooting a child?’ Distressed, and pale, he stopped and said he had to leave.8

  Although Koltsov enjoyed a high, not to say luxurious, standard of living in Moscow, the chance to go to Spain must have come as an immense relief from the ever more oppressive political atmosphere in Russia. En route, he met the son of the Spanish Prime Minister José Giral in Paris on 6 August. It was an indication of Koltsov’s perceived influence that the younger Giral asked him to inform Moscow that the Republic needed ‘trained officers, especially pilots, if a catastrophe is to be averted’.9 Koltsov was the first Soviet newspaper correspondent to reach Spain. On the evening of his arrival in Barcelona, he sent his first despatch to Pravda.10 Five years earlier, he had visited Spain, meeting the young Communists Dolores Ibárruri in Bilbao and José Díaz in Seville and producing a book entitled Spanish Spring.11 Now back in Spain, Koltsov lost little time in assuming a role as a political adviser to the Republican authorities. He carried no credentials other than those of a Pravda editor and special correspondent, but the importance of that was immediately recognized. Lieutenant Colonel Felipe Díaz Sandino, Minister of Defence in the recently constituted Catalan Government of Joan Casanovas, placed a car at his disposal. Within two days, he had been received by the anarchist leader Juan García Oliver, by the leadership of the Catalan Communist Party, the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, and by Casanovas himself. By the following day, he was at the front in Huesca and happily giving advice to the local commander. He then expressed a desire to meet the legendary anarchist
leader, Buenaventura Durruti, who was on the Aragón front at Bujaraloz. At first Durruti had no interest in talking to him until he read in the letter of introduction from García Oliver the words ‘Moscow’ and ‘Pravda’.

  Despite enjoying such access to important politicians, like all correspondents, Koltsov quickly ran into the difficulties of the censorship, the chronic shortage of telephone lines and Spain’s limited telegraph system.12 He reached Madrid on 18 August and within twenty-four hours had spoken not just with leaders of the Communist Party but also with the prime minister, the Professor of Chemistry, Dr José Giral, and the Minister of War, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Hernández Saravia. Within a week, he had managed to interview the moderate Socialist Indalecio Prieto, who was effectively running the war effort from the shadows. It is a tribute both to Koltsov’s journalistic ability and to his status that Prieto spoke to him with quite amazing frankness about his contempt for Largo Caballero. A day later, via the mediation of Julio Álvarez del Vayo, whom he knew from his days as a correspondent in Moscow, he was able to interview both President Manuel Azaña and Largo Caballero himself. In his unrestrained criticisms of the government of Dr Giral, Largo was as frank as Prieto had been.13 Four days after becoming prime minister on 4 September 1937, Largo Caballero would receive Koltsov for another long conversation.14

  There have been wild exaggerations about Koltsov’s role in the Spanish Civil War. One German scholar claimed absurdly that he had arrived in Spain with the rank of general in the Soviet air force and with the job of establishing a Spanish equivalent of the NKVD.15 It was bizarrely alleged that he spoke once or twice every day on the telephone with Stalin to give him news of the Spanish situation. This idea derived from Claud Cockburn, a Communist journalist who established a close friendship with Koltsov in Spain, and has subsequently gained wide currency despite its utter implausibility. Cockburn told the American author Peter Wyden that once, when he was speaking on the telephone to Stalin from Gaylord’s Hotel, Koltsov allowed him to listen on an extension to the dictator’s grunts. In an article, Cockburn exaggerated this hugely to the point of saying that Koltsov had ‘a direct line from his room in the Palace Hotel, Madrid’ to Stalin’s desk in the Kremlin, and he talked, briefly or at length, with Stalin ‘three or four times a week’ and ‘sometimes I could hear Stalin’s voice asking questions from the other end’. Cockburn’s wife Patricia elevated this further into something that happened once or twice every day.16 The telephone connection from Madrid to Moscow, via Barcelona and Paris, was neither regularly functional nor sufficiently secure for any such conversations to be likely even had Stalin been sufficiently interested in daily bulletins from Spain. It is possible that, in exaggerating, Cockburn was simply building upon Koltsov’s own boasts. However, as a letter to Stalin from Koltsov revealed, even the most senior Soviet emissaries were reluctant to send information even by telegraph, where it could be coded, let alone by telephone, which could be relatively easily tapped.17

  It is inconceivable that Koltsov had a senior rank either in the Soviet air force or the NKVD. Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that although officially no more than the Pravda correspondent, Koltsov did play a role in Spain that went far beyond his journalistic responsibilities. Santiago Carrillo, who was Consejero de Orden Público in the Junta de Madrid, remembered him simply as having far greater influence than any other correspondent. During the siege of the capital, he seemed to be more important than the Ambassador Marcel Rosenberg. However, Carrillo categorically dismissed the idea of the daily telephone calls, recalling that regular reporting to the Kremlin took place from the embassy via coded radio transmissions. Usually, to get his Pravda despatches out during the siege of Madrid, Koltsov had to phone them to the Hotel Majestic in Barcelona, whence they were transmitted to Moscow. Direct telephone communication was a rarity, although it did take place occasionally.18

  Beyond the more extreme exaggerations, many contemporary eyewitnesses noted Koltsov’s importance. The well-informed Sovietologist, Louis Fischer, a man who came into frequent contact with Koltsov, described him as ‘Pravda’s correspondent in Spain and unofficially Stalin’s eyes and ears in the country’ – the first of several commentators to use the phrase.19 Hemingway called Koltsov ‘one of the three most important men in Spain’, although that particular exaggeration was typical of his constant efforts to show that he was in the know and had access to everyone worth knowing.20 The novelist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote:

  The Spaniards regarded him not only as a famous journalist but also as a political adviser. It would be difficult to visualize the first year of the Spanish war without Koltsov. Small, active courageous, so acute that his intelligence positively became a burden to him, he sized up a situation at a glance, saw all the weaknesses and never pampered himself with illusions.21

  The NKVD agent (officer), Colonel Alexander Orlov (born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin, he officially changed his name to Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky in 1920), claimed that Koltsov was sent to Spain ‘by Stalin as his personal observer’, which is not remarkable since it was very much what a Pravda editor would have been expected to be.22 These views have been subsumed into the received wisdom on the Spanish Civil War. Hugh Thomas, for instance, presented Koltsov as ‘probably Stalin’s personal agent in Spain, with on occasion a direct line to the Kremlin’. The Russian historian Olga Novikova considered him as ‘the liaison between Stalin and the Spanish authorities’.23

  In his diary, Koltsov separated the journalistic tasks which he attributed to himself from the military-political ones, which he attributed to a Mexican by the name of ‘Miguel Martínez’ who had allegedly fought in the Mexican Revolution, yet, like Koltsov himself as a young man, had supposedly been involved in the First World War and the Russian Civil War. Moreover, Koltsov described ‘Martínez’ in terms that suggest that he was talking about himself: ‘a Mexican Communist of below average height who, like me, had arrived yesterday’. Elsewhere we learn that he wears glasses.24 The text is also littered with other clues that suggest that Koltsov and ‘Martínez’ were the same man. The author described Martínez’s hair-raising flight from Paris to Barcelona in an aircraft piloted by Abel Guides. Suspecting that the pilot might have been planning to take him to the rebel zone, ‘Miguel’ contemplated shooting Guides and then piloting the plane himself – something that Koltsov was certainly capable of doing. On 8 June 1937 in Bilbao, Koltsov had a conversation with Guides about the incident from which it is quite clear that it was Koltsov himself who had considered shooting the pilot. He claimed that Miguel Martínez went every evening to the offices of the Communist newspaper, Mundo Obrero, and helped in the production of the following day’s issue – precisely what Koltsov used to do. Elsewhere, during the retreat from Talavera, ‘Miguel Martínez’ saw a small pistol in the hands of the writer María Teresa de León; and later it is Koltsov who remembered seeing her with the pistol at the same place.25 Koltsov’s younger brother, the world-famous Pravda cartoonist, Boris Efimovich Friedland, known as Boris Efimov, his biographers, Skorokhodov and Rubashkin, and other scholars have all assumed that ‘Miguel Martínez’ was Koltsov himself. Enrique Líster, the commander of the Communist Quinto Regimiento, which was later to form the nucleus of the Popular Army, had frequent and regular contact with Koltsov, as the diary attests. He assured Ian Gibson that he had no doubt that Koltsov and ‘Miguel Martínez’ were the same person.26

  There can be no doubt that many of the activities attributed to ‘Miguel Martínez’ were Koltsov’s. It may well be, however, that the devotedly pro-Soviet Líster was endeavouring to conceal the true identity of ‘Miguel Martínez’ or at least of some component part thereof. In other words, it is possible that some of the activities attributed to ‘Miguel Martínez’ may not have been carried out by Koltsov. In his memoirs of the siege of Madrid, Vicente Rojo, the Republican Chief of Staff, writes of knowing ‘Miguel Martínez’ and of his work with the Quinto Regimiento. It is certainly the case that Koltsov knew Rojo and he wrote about
him on more than one occasion.27 However, the fact that Rojo did not identify ‘Martínez’ as Koltsov has provoked the suspicions of the Russian scholar Boris Volodarsky and of Spanish historian Ángel Viñas that there was a separate ‘Miguel Martínez’ who had been in contact with Rojo. Based on the research of Boris Volodarsky in Russian security archives, they have reached the conclusion that at least some of the activities attributed to ‘Miguel Martínez’ were carried out not by Koltsov, but by a Soviet agent of Lithuanian origin. The man in question, Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich, was a twenty-three-year-old member of the NKVD ‘Administration of Special Tasks’, a section specializing in assassination, terror and sabotage on foreign soil. He had learned Spanish in Argentina and reached Spain in September 1936. He would later head the first attempt on Trotsky’s life in Mexico. Accordingly, the ‘Miguel Martínez’ portrayed by Koltsov may have been a composite portrait of various individuals – Koltsov himself, Grigulevich and possibly the Russian Military Attaché, General Vladimir Gorev. Station head of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) in Madrid, Gorev reported to Moscow that Koltsov ‘carried out to the letter all the orders that I gave in relation to the defence of the city’.28