We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Cockburn was right that Koltsov’s sharp wit was not to the liking of everyone. His interpreter, Paulina Abramson, wrote:

  Many people who had the good fortune to know Koltsov were attracted by his temperament and by his ability to capture instantly the essence of any problem. I don’t dare say that he was liked by everyone who knew him; indeed there were those who seriously disliked him. He was an intolerant person, to some extent, and just could not put up with limited or obtuse people.62

  Ilya Ehrenburg commented: ‘the friendship which he professed towards me was tainted by a touch of contempt’.63

  Alongside his myriad literary and political activities, Koltsov also conducted intensely complicated personal relationships. His wife, the tall and angular journalist Elisabeta Ratmanova, arrived in Barcelona at the beginning of November 1936. She was there on behalf of the newspaper of the Komosomol (Communist youth) Komsomolskaia Pravda, although like all Russian personnel, she was also expected to provide reports for the NKVD about her compatriots.64 The one conversation between the couple that is recorded in his diary is terse and cold. Lisa was understandably angry to have discovered that Koltsov had renewed his love affair with a voluptuous twenty-four-year-old German Communist writer, Maria Greßhöner. She was known by her pen-name Maria Osten, which she had taken because of her admiration for the Soviet Union. She was green-eyed with a sensual, almond-shaped face, and Koltsov had been in love with her ever since the composer Ernst Busch and the writer Ludwig Renn had introduced them in Berlin in 1932. He had subsequently arranged for her to work in Moscow for the German-language newspaper Deutsche Zentral Zeitung.

  She lived with Koltsov and, in October 1934, they went to the Saarland on the German-French border, which was administered by the League of Nations. In January 1935 a plebiscite was to be held for the inhabitants to decide on union with France or Germany. Since the area’s rich coal resources were being systematically plundered by the French as reparation for war damage, there was little chance of the people opting for union with France, all the more so given the efficacy of the Nazi propaganda in favour of union with the Third Reich. However, in the hope of damaging Hitler’s prestige, the Comintern planned a campaign in favour of the area remaining under the League and that was why Koltsov and Maria Osten were there. In fact, the plebiscite of January 1935 saw a massive victory for the Nazis. It was in that context that they agreed to take back to the Soviet Union Hubert L’Hoste, the twelve-year-old son of a local Communist miner from the Saarland. The boy was a fanatical admirer of the Soviet system. Maria Osten and Koltsov wrote a hymn of praise to the Soviet Union as allegedly seen through the eyes of Hubert. Titled Hubert im Wonderland and with a preface by Georgi Dimitrov, it was a huge bestseller. Shortly after being posted to Spain, he arranged for Maria Osten to join him as the Deutsche Zentral Zeitung correspondent.65

  It is difficult to know how much time Koltsov had to spend with Maria Osten in Spain, given his all-absorbing activities. According to Sefton Delmer’s distorted recollection, Koltsov always turned up at the front or the ministries ‘with one or more of his train of women. He would have with him either his wife, a neurotic-looking ex-ballerina, or Comrade “Bola”, an enormous cheerful peasant who was his secretary assistant, or Maria Osten, a blond vivacious gamine of a young German Communist.’66 There is certainly evidence that he went to the front with Maria Osten and little doubt that she was the love of his life.67 Moreover, with or without female company, he seems to have been welcome at the front, not just because officers appreciated that he was prepared to risk his life along with their men, but also because of his ability to lift the spirits of those engaged in the battle. Ehrenburg wrote that he ‘could hearten even those enthusiasts who easily fell into despair’. This was not the fruit of misplaced or frivolous optimism, but of grimly realistic ability to make the best of any situation. His philosophy could be summed up as ‘grin and bear it’, yet, however bleak the situation, ‘an hour later he would be putting fresh heart into some Spanish politician by persuading him that victory was certain and so everything was alright’.68

  The extent both of Koltsov’s military knowledge and his ability to boost the morale of those around him was revealed by an incident during the battle of Jarama in the first week of February 1937. After a savage attack by Franco’s Moorish troops, the crucial bridge near Arganda was lost. A demoralized Gustav Regler went to the Hotel Palace in Madrid hoping for some consolation from Koltsov. Before Regler could explain his depression, Koltsov said: ‘I know all about it. The troops guarding the bridge were surprised. The Moors crept up on soft-soled sandals. You did not know that large numbers had been assembling on the plateau during the past few days. They knew every footpath, and they had had three days’ rest.’ Regler was struck by Koltsov’s command of the details of the defeat. Polishing his glasses, Koltsov continued:

  The valley was asleep, you were asleep, the whole staff was asleep. You should have tested the telephone-lines – but you hadn’t enough wire to carry out repairs. You should have sent a reconnaissance plane by daylight over the hill – but you hadn’t a plane. You should have kept the hill under constant fire – but you only had one field gun, because the other’s being overhauled. I know it all. I’m talking like a Pharisee. Why don’t you shout at me? We should have sent you a tank-squadron – am I not right? Isn’t that what you’re thinking?

  Replacing his glasses, he continued sadly and prophetically: ‘Without glasses everything looks black to me. If they ever shoot me I shall have to ask them not to take my glasses off first.’69

  To cheer Regler up, Koltsov took him to a farewell party for a Soviet engineer who had set up the searchlight installation for the International Brigade’s anti-aircraft guns. He been recalled to Moscow and seemed cheerful, displaying the presents he was taking home for his family. Regler was astonished by the atmosphere at the party: ‘Here there was none of the slavish terror of the Moscow intellectual. Under the hail of Fascist bullets they forgot the bullet in the back of the neck, the secret executions of the GPU. Their talk was relaxed, uncharged with double meanings, un-Asiatic.’ The scene he described inadvertently explained why the advisers in Spain would be so unwelcome back in Moscow: ‘in becoming partisans they were made whole again – they became new men! The stink of Moscow was blown away by the winds of the Sierra and this heroic Spain.’ On the next day, Koltsov visited the front and asked about the searchlights. When Regler said they were ‘a legacy’ from the engineer, Koltsov laughed sardonically and said: ‘A legacy? That’s the literal truth!’ Alarmed, Regler asked if something had happened to him on his journey. ‘On the journey? No,’ replied Koltsov, ‘but something will happen to him when he arrives. He’ll be arrested when he reaches Odessa.’ Regler was nauseated and puzzled about the previous night’s party. Koltsov explained: ‘The French give a man rum before they lead him out to the guillotine. In these days we give him champagne.’ When Regler repeated that he felt unwell, Koltsov allegedly said: ‘It’s not easy for a European to get used to Asiatic customs.’70

  Koltsov has been portrayed by the American writer Stephen Koch as a vicious and malevolent informer in Spain. He asserted without the slightest basis for doing so: ‘It was Koltsov who concocted the disinformation used to destroy Andreu Nin; his articles in Izvestiya provided the Popular Front with the smears described by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. […] Koltsov regularly filed top-secret reports with the NKVD denouncing – thereby killing – “Trotskyite scum” in Spain.’71 While this is certainly a wildly imaginative invention, Koltsov’s links with the NKVD have also been remarked upon by Arkadi Vaksberg, a Russian expert on the purge trials.72 All Soviet functionaries abroad were expected to report to the NKVD on what they saw. Koltsov, for instance, on 4 December 1937, reported on a Soviet Commissar named Kachelin, criticizing his ‘demoralizing provocative reports at a meeting about the arrests in the Red Army’.73 However, this does not mean that Koltsov, any more than the Soviet Ambassador Marcel Rosenberg or the Gen
eral Consul in Barcelona, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, were agents of the security services.

  That Koltsov believed in the need for the Soviet security services is, on the other hand, indisputable. Three years before the outbreak of war in Spain, Koltsov had written a book about Soviet military life. In one of the chapters, he suggested that, given that the Soviet Revolution was always threatened by counter-revolutionaries, the terror exercised by the Cheka, the GPU and the NKVD were a necessary evil, ‘the organ of defence and protection’ of the working class. He wrote:

  ‘Yet I don’t know whether the work of the GPU is not the most important of them all. To do this work we need really honest, really unselfish, really reliable communist revolutionaries. We have them, and those whom the Party and the Soviet State have appointed to other posts must never forget the services rendered by these men – ever watchful, ever alert, ever on the qui vive. Beyond our borders, in the general staffs of the mighty foreign powers, in the palaces of the industrial bosses, in the glittering cabarets and restaurants, strong and subtle plots are being fabricated; in front of huge fireproof safes, over heaps of gold, amidst the rustle of stocks and bonds, there is a barter going on for the heads of the Bolsheviks, for the lives of the workers and peasants, for their lives and factories. Over the champagne glasses, mercenaries and spies, assassins and frauds, provocateurs and gamblers are being given their instructions – to destroy the Soviet rule.74

  It requires a substantial leap, however, to assume, as some commentators have done, that Koltsov was responsible for the horrific fate of Andreu Nin. Certainly, it is the case that in articles published in Pravda and Izvestiya, and reprinted in L’Humanité and other Communist newspapers in Europe, Koltsov denounced the POUM as ‘a formation of Franco-Hitler-Mussolini agents who are organising treason in the front line and Trotskyist-terrorist assassinations in the rearguard’. His writings on the POUM, behind which he could see ‘the criminal hand of Trotsky’, were published in a pamphlet with the title ‘Evidence of the Trotskyist Treachery’.75 Trotsky’s close collaborator in the Fourth International, the German Walter Held, wrote in early February 1937 that as part of his determination to annihilate the POUM, Stalin had sent to Spain: ‘that journalistic scum Mikhail Koltsov, specialist in pogroms, who learned this honourable trade in the service of Petljura, the assassin of the Ukraine, in order to put in train a campaign of calumnies against the POUM’.76 Although Koltsov was not in Spain from 2 April to 24 May 1937, he still wrote articles in Pravda reproducing the official Communist line that Andreu Nin had been rescued from custody by Nazi agents.77 However, he was far from alone in this and his parroting of the party line on the POUM does not make him the assassin of Nin or the brains behind the assault on the POUM. In fact, the POUM appears fewer than ten times in Koltsov’s diary. The longest entry, dated 21 January 1937, is ironic more than vicious in its description of the POUM leadership and virtually dismisses both the POUM and Trotskyism as insignificant.78

  On 27 March 1937, Koltsov told Dolores Ibárruri that he had to go back to Moscow to report on the political and military situation in Spain but that he hoped to return soon. The need for him to report in person further undermines the idea that he spoke daily on the telephone with Stalin. He crossed the border from Spain into France on 2 April and remained in Moscow until the third week of May.79 It is a sign of his importance that, on the evening of 15 April, for nearly two hours, he was grilled by Stalin himself, by Lazar Kaganovich, by the Soviet premier, Vyacheslav Molotov, by Marshal Voroshilov, and by Nikolai Yezhov, successor to the vicious Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda as the head of the NKVD.80 This was the narrow circle within which all major foreign-policy decisions were taken. With the Republic’s Basque outpost about to fall, it was an especially bleak picture that Koltsov had to describe. To his surprise, Stalin seemed happy enough with what he heard. Nevertheless, with apparent despondency, he told Koltsov that he was distressed about the number of traitors being discovered in the USSR and that his only consolation was the performance of the Soviet mission in Spain.81

  Later that evening, Koltsov recounted to his brother the bizarre ending to the meeting. Stalin began to clown around:

  He stood in front of me and, placing his arm across his chest, bowed and asked: ‘What are you called in Spanish? Miguel?’ I replied: ‘Miguel, Comrade Stalin.’ ‘Very well, Don Miguel. We, noble Spaniards, thank you cordially for your most interesting report. We’ll see you soon, Comrade Koltsov. Good luck, Don Miguel.’ ‘I am entirely at the service of the Soviet Union, Comrade Stalin.’ I was just going to the door when he called me back again and a strange conversation ensued: ‘Do you possess a revolver, Comrade Koltsov?’ Completely thrown, I replied: ‘Yes, Comrade Stalin.’ ‘You aren’t thinking about committing suicide, are you?’ Even more perplexed, I replied: ‘Of course not. It has never occurred to me.’ Stalin just said: ‘Excellent. Excellent. Thank you again, Comrade Koltsov. We’ll see you soon, Don Miguel.’

  Koltsov then asked his brother: ‘Do you know what I read with absolute certainty in Stalin’s eyes?’ ‘What?’ ‘I read in them: He is just too smart.’ On the following day, one of those present, probably Yezhov, told him: ‘Remember, Mikhail, that you are appreciated, esteemed and trusted’, but he couldn’t get the idea of Stalin’s mistrust out of his mind.82

  That Koltsov had long since been worried about what was happening in Moscow was revealed by his remarks to Regler about the searchlight engineer. His anxiety level had been raised by the encounter with Stalin and would have been much greater had he known that, while he was still in Moscow, in mid-May 1937, according to the highly unreliable Orlov, a special courier who had previously worked in the Special Department of the NKVD arrived in Spain with the diplomatic pouch. One of Orlov’s officers, who was a friend of the courier, reported that this man was telling ‘strange stories’, alleging that Koltsov had ‘sold himself to the English and supplied Lord Beaverbrook with secret information about the Soviet Union’.83 This is probably an invention, as was Orlov’s claim that the NKVD chief, the cruel and malevolent Yezhov, nicknamed ‘the blackberry’ by Stalin, ‘the poison dwarf’ by others, was a close friend of Koltsov. Indeed, Orlov claimed that, on this trip to Moscow, Koltsov had taken with him a handsome, two-year-old Spanish orphan boy for Yezhov and his wife, Yevgenia Feigenberg, because they had recently lost their only child. It is certainly the case that Mikhail and Maria adopted an eighteen-month-old Spanish boy called José (Jusik) and took him to the Soviet Union, although it is unlikely that this was as a gift for Yezhov, since Maria was desperate for a child of her own.84

  Koltsov certainly cultivated the sexually degenerate Yezhov. He had even described him in Pravda as ‘a wonderful unyielding Bolshevik who, without getting up from his desk day and night is unravelling and cutting the threads of fascist conspiracy’.85 Since both he and Boris Efimov were ex-members of the left opposition, they must have long since been dreading the late-night knock on the door. Koltsov may have felt safe as long as Yezhov remained head of the NKVD. On the other hand, his inveterate love of danger seems to have impelled him to have a brief affair with Yezhov’s wife, the notoriously promiscuous Yevgenia Feigenberg.86 It is a strange coincidence that Koltov’s own downfall would coincide with the arrest and interrogation of her husband in December 1938, although the investigation that would damn Koltsov had already been ordered by the cuckolded security chief.

  There was another meeting with Stalin on the afternoon of 14 May, at which Molotov was also present.87 By 23 May, Koltsov was in France on his way back to Spain. From 24 May to 11 June, he spent a dangerous two weeks, first trying to get into the Basque Country and then reporting on the ever more desperate situation in Bilbao. Showing characteristic courage and daring, he flew back and forth from France to the Basque capital, where he interviewed the president, José Antonio de Aguirre.88 He then returned first to Barcelona and then to Valencia to help organize the international Anti-Fascist Writers’ congress during the first two weeks of July. A
lthough the principal purpose of the congress was to demonstrate that the bulk of the world’s intellectuals supported the Republic, there was also a hidden agenda, which was to denounce the ‘treachery’ of André Gide’s recently published critique of the USSR, Retour de l’URSS, which most of the delegates had not had a chance to read. The delegates were chauffeured in a fleet of limousines from Barcelona to Valencia and then on to Madrid, treated to banquet after banquet in a starving country. Stephen Spender, a British delegate, found something grotesque about ‘this circus of intellectuals, treated like princes or ministers, carried for hundreds of miles through beautiful scenery and war-torn towns, to the sound of cheering voices, amid broken hearts, riding in Rolls Royces, banqueted, fêted, sung and danced to, photographed and drawn’. Jef Last, the Dutch novelist and poet, and a member of the International Brigades, attended the congress. Although a friend of Gide, he considered his book to be one-sided and inopportune, but he thought that the Russian obsession with attacking Trotskyism and Gide was utterly counter-productive.89 Koltsov may well have agreed but, when the entire circus transferred to Madrid on 7 July, he made a speech praising the spirit of anti-fascism that brought the intellectuals together and denouncing Gide’s Retour de l’URSS as a ‘filthy slander’.

  The version of Koltsov’s speech published in the Spanish press on the following day includes a passage omitted in the diary. In it, in much the same spirit as had infused his 1933 essay on the GPU, he effectively described the terror in the Soviet Union as preventive: