We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Certainly, there were many rumours and reports flying around in the summer of 1938 about deliveries of Russian aircraft to Czechoslovakia and a Red air force delegation may well have flown to Prague to discuss possible collaboration. However, Stalin was unlikely to have made a commitment to the Czechs without knowing that he would be acting in concert with the French. In any case, Bene?, fearful that the Red Army would occupy Czechoslovakia, was resolved to fight only if the League of Nations, Britain and France were ready to fight. He was not prepared to resist Hitler’s demands if that meant fighting a war with only the Soviet Union as an ally. With Koltsov and the embassy staff in despair, the Soviet air force delegation was despatched back eastwards. Then, just as they were airborne, it seemed as if Bene? had changed his mind and it appeared as if some agreement might be reached. Koltsov danced wildly, ‘kissing people, throwing his big black beret repeatedly into the air’. His joy was short-lived. No agreement was reached between Stalin and Bene? and Koltsov was plunged into despair.109

  Whether the lack of Soviet-Czech collaboration against the Germans was the fault of Stalin or Bene?, or even of the French and British, does not matter. Koltsov feared that it was the end for anti-fascism and that Stalin would now turn towards some kind of rapprochement with Hitler. Indeed, Stalin had never shared the uncompromising anti-fascism of Old Bolsheviks such as Bukharin and, indeed, Koltsov.110 Koltsov’s misery could be easily understood. The West had just effectively handed over to the Third Reich the substantial military resources of Czechoslovakia – more than fifteen hundred aircraft, over five hundred anti-aircraft guns, over two thousand artillery pieces, and large quantities of machine-guns, ammunition and vehicles. As Louis Fischer put it: ‘Any planes, tanks, and other arms produced, any divisions trained and equipped by Britain and France between the end of September, 1938 (Munich), and September 1, 1939, when the war began, could not nearly match the power of Czechoslovakia’s armed forces which the Anglo-French lost when Hitler dismembered that state.’111

  It is far from clear that Koltsov had the ‘position at the Kremlin’ described by Cockburn or that he was the emissary responsible for negotiating with Bene? about possible Russian aid to Czechoslovakia. Whether Cockburn’s view derived from his own tendency to exaggerate or from Koltsov’s hyperbole is unclear. Martha Gellhorn got the same impression of Koltsov’s crucial diplomatic importance when she met him in Prague. Having come from Barcelona to report on the Czech situation, she bumped into an utterly dejected Koltsov. She had found him, ‘shrunken, all his brilliance gone’, sitting on a wooden bench in a long, dark corridor of the Hradcany Palace: ‘He took me to dinner in a small, bleak, workers’ restaurant, not his sort of place. When the heavy bowls of soup were served, he began to talk. He had been waiting in that corridor in the Hradcany for four days.’ Bene? would not receive him and had left him sitting in the public corridor. Gellhorn was distressed to see Koltsov so ‘tired and hopeless. He foresaw everything exactly as it happened. We despaired further over thick, greasy food. Then we shook hands on a dark street corner and said goodbye.’112

  Koltsov was equally despondent when he took his leave of Cockburn. They sat in a café, dissecting what had happened. The course of the conversation led them to the ‘fantastic burlesque’ mentioned by Cockburn. He had been anxious to get to a bank to exchange English pounds for Czech currency to pay his hotel bill and then catch a plane to London. Koltsov was reluctant to curtail the conversation. Pointing out that he had plenty of Koronas, he offered to change them into Sterling. As he took the pound notes from Cockburn, he commented: ‘This, of course, may be the death of me.’ When Cockburn asked what he meant, he went into a reverie, and proceeded to mount a one-man courtroom drama with himself playing three parts, himself as the accused, the judge and the public prosecutor. As the prosecutor, he was convincingly threatening: ‘Do you deny, citizen Koltsov, that in Prague on the date in question you received British currency from the well-known British Intelligence Agent Cockburn? Do you deny that you insinuated that same agent into the Legation of the Soviet Union? Do you deny that you discussed with him the military disposition of the Soviet Union, including the operation of planes at the Prague military airfield?’ After appointing Cockburn as the London correspondent of Pravda, he sadly took his leave, saying: ‘the only thing to say is that in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne’.113 His gloomy sense that this was the end was intensified for another reason. He had hoped to be able to make a trip from Prague to Paris to see Maria Osten but, at the last minute, the Soviet Ambassador told him that he had received orders for his immediate return to Moscow. He must have known that the end of his hopes for a continuation of the anti-fascist struggle went hand in hand with his own destruction.114

  Koltsov’s evident sense of impending doom contrasted with his apparently burgeoning public prestige and acclaim. In the summer of 1938, he had been elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. According to his brother, despite his continuing faith in Stalin’s wisdom, he was ever more concerned about the number of his friends being arrested. Although Koltsov still had occasional access to Stalin, he increasingly felt that something was wrong, especially when he was not invited to any high-level meetings when the head of the Spanish Republican air force, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, came to discuss supplies for the Republic. Ignacio was a friend of Koltsov and they had collaborated in Spain. It would have been logical for Koltsov, as an expert on Spain and aircraft, to be present at the discussions for more Soviet aid. On 9 December, Hidalgo de Cisneros had dinner with Koltsov. Koltsov was delighted to be told by him that the meeting with Stalin had gone well and that he had reacted positively to Spanish requests for aid. However, that Koltsov was still worried about Stalin’s snub became clear when Boris Efimov arrived. On the previous day, the man whom Koltsov regarded as his protector, Nikolai Yezhov, was replaced by Lavrenti Beria as People’s Commissar for Home Affairs. When Boris Efimov commented that this was good news and that the Terror of the Yezhovschina was over, Mikhail replied gloomily: ‘Perhaps suspicion will now fall on those that Yezhov left untouched.’115

  Koltsov’s fears must have seemed groundless when, some weeks earlier, at an evening performance at the Bolshoi, Stalin had invited him to his box and had spoken warmly about the Spanish diary. This was the moment when he had been invited to give a lecture about the recently published History of the Bolshevik Party, which Stalin himself had meticulously edited and to which he had contributed a chapter. Koltsov had eagerly agreed, hoping that this signified a turn for the better. Certainly there were grounds for optimism, since two days before the lecture about Stalin’s book, ‘Compendium of the History of the Party’, Pravda reported that Koltsov had been made a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, a very significant honour. In the late afternoon of 12 December, happy and smiling, he had made his last appearance in public. He fulfilled his promise to the dictator and addressed a full and appreciative house at the Writers’ Union. Late in the evening, he went back to his office at Pravda to do some work. Shortly after his arrival, agents of the NKVD detained him. His apartment was searched and ‘substantial writings’ were removed by the sack-load and burnt.116

  The real reasons for Koltsov’s arrest have never been clarified. As late as 1964, Ilya Ehrenburg still could not work out why the intransigent and independent Pasternak had survived while Koltsov, who ‘honourably carried out every task assigned to him’, had been liquidated.117 There are many possibilities of which the most plausible is, in general terms, Koltsov’s Spanish service. By late 1938, Stalin and his soon-to-be chief of state security, Lavrenti Beria, were collaborating on the show trials of a huge network of supposed spies. Stalin would soon enough be considering an improvement in relations with the Third Reich, but not yet. However, although Russian aid to the Spanish Republic had diminished somewhat from late 1937 and throughout the summer of 1938, in the autumn Stalin had belatedly ren
ewed his interest in Spain. Nevertheless, Koltsov, like many other army officers, pilots, diplomats, policemen and journalists who had served in the Spanish Civil War, was an object of suspicion, assumed somehow to have been infected by Trotskyist ideas while there.

  A specific suggestion about Koltsov’s ‘offence’ in relation to Spain came from Adelina Kondratieva, who, together with her sister Paulina, served as an interpreter with the Soviet advisers in the Spanish Civil War, and was also an operative of the GRU. She believed that the immediate trigger for the arrest was a written denunciation emanating from André Marty, the French Communist who was head of the International Brigade’s organization in Spain. Vaksberg also refers to Marty bypassing normal Comintern procedures and sending the denunciation directly to Stalin. Mediocre, envious, servile and cruel, Marty’s qualities ensured his favoured position within the hierarchy of world Communism.118 Marty’s anti-Trotskyist paranoia and his suspicions of Koltsov’s free-spirited energy and creativity were on a par with those of Stalin himself. Marty was notorious for his denunciations of suspected ‘Trotskyists’ in Spain. In addition to high-handed actions against International Brigades, he also sent Stalin directly several devastating accusations against Soviet personnel. Hemingway recounts, with some verisimilitude, a scene in which Karkov (Koltsov) overturns a stupidly high-handed mistake by Marty. As he tells it, Koltsov threatens Marty, saying ‘I am going to find out just how untouchable you are’, and Marty watches him ‘with no expression on his face except anger and dislike. There was nothing in his mind now but that Karkov/Koltsov had done something against him. Alright, Karkov, power and all, could watch out.’ There is no proof that this incident took place. However, Josephine Herbst recalled that one of Hemingway’s most useful contacts was an interpreter on Marty’s staff who gave him information about the Frenchman’s relations with the Russians.119 Whether as a result of harbouring a grudge against Koltsov because of this incident or because of a more generalized resentment, Marty wrote a letter denouncing his unauthorized interference in military matters and his contacts with the POUM. Although the latter accusations were absurd, they were received avidly in Moscow.120

  According to General Dimitri Volkogonov, quoting an anonymous but ‘prominent’ NKVD source, prior to Marty’s letter, someone else had already made a verbal denunciation of Koltsov’s alleged contacts with foreign intelligence organizations, but Stalin had delayed taking action. However, it was the sight of written denunciations, possibly including the letter from Marty, that stirred the dictator to order Koltsov’s arrest.121 Nevertheless, Koltsov’s fate has to be put in the general context of the imprisonment or execution of many of the most prominent men who had been advisers in Spain – General Vladimir Efimovich Gorev, who provided crucial advice during the defence of Madrid; Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the consul in Barcelona; Marcel Rosenberg, the Ambassador in Madrid; General Emilio Kléber (Manfred Stern), briefly the commander of the International Brigades, to name just a few. All had participated in an inspiring revolutionary adventure within the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. The reasons were probably different in each case, although, where executions were concerned, Stalin did not need many reasons and their experience in the West sufficed to render them suspect. However, there is a more specific reason in Koltsov’s case. His massively popular book recounted with passion the story of a country where revolutionary fervour and idealism still flourished, in direct contrast with the situation in the Soviet Union, where Stalin was crushing the life out of the revolution.122 The Spanish situation had inspired Soviet youth with dreams that were the very antithesis of Stalin’s policy and Koltsov was its chronicler. As Louis Fischer commented:

  The cause of Spain aroused intense enthusiasm throughout Russia. Many communists and non-communists hoped that the events in Spain might lend new life to the dying flame of the Russian revolution. Not Stalin. He had consented to sell the Spanish Republic arms. But not to make a revolution. He intended in the near future to snuff out the flame with Russian blood.123

  However, Koltsov and others who went to Spain might have hoped that victory in Spain might bring about change back home.

  Another contribution might well have been the fact that from late 1937, Koltsov had begun to be the object of slurs emanating from the Third Reich. A publication called Bolshevism and the Jews referred to him as ‘Friedland-Kolzoff’ and portrayed him as one of the most important Jews in Russian journalism.124 Given the scale of anti-Semitism within Stalin’s immediate entourage, such attacks could not be simply dismissed as merely what was to be expected from the Nazis. Koltsov had the further disadvantage of being a friend of another prominent, albeit relatively untouchable, Jew, Maxim Litvinov. Now, in the wake of the Munich agreement, the policy of collective security, associated with Litvinov, had lost much of its attraction. Stalin would soon contemplate a possible link with the Third Reich. Seeing Munich as proof of the Western allies’ readiness to encourage Hitler’s eastward ambitions, Stalin was much less committed to the quest for alliances with the Western democracies.125

  When Marty’s denunciation arrived, Stalin would have been open to believing it, since he already harboured plenty of reasons for resentment against Koltsov. It would have confirmed the accusations made in the dossier from the NKVD, which he had received on 27 September 1938. It contained accusations that Koltsov maintained relationships with Trotskyists and counter-revolutionaries, and that he had criticized the Terror and the arrests related to it. The dossier, drawn up on the initiative of Yezhov, made much of Koltsov’s friendship with Karl Radek and claimed that they had collaborated on a plot to kill Stalin. It claimed that there was something suspicious about Koltsov’s close friendship with Maxim Gorki, whose biography he wrote, and whom he had visited regularly, once famously with André Malraux. His relationship with Maria Osten was portrayed as deeply sinister. In the report, Koltsov’s lover was absurdly described as the daughter of ‘a wealthy German Trotskyist landowner’ and given the aristocratic title of Maria von Osten, when her real name was Maria Greßhöner and ‘Maria Osten’ her journalistic nom de plume. She was accused of Trotskyist agitation among German émigrés while living a life of luxury in Moscow before accompanying Koltsov to Spain and of going to France afterwards with a lover, Ernst Busch. In fact, she had taken refuge in Paris and the musician Busch was simply a friend.126 It has been suggested that the malice of the accusations against Maria Osten derived from Lisa Ratmanova, Koltsov’s jealous wife, who was friends with both Yezhov and Beria, and provided them with reports.127 There was no shortage of accusations. Under interrogation, Beria’s predecessor, the doomed Nikolai Yezhov, had denounced Koltsov along with several other literary figures, including Isaak Babel, who had slept with his wife, Yevgenia Feigenberg.128

  Although he did not act immediately on the NKVD report, Stalin would have been receptive to its contents. The dictator’s resentment towards Koltsov may have been masked by the invitation to lecture at the Writers’ Union, but he harboured a number of specific grudges. He had found one in the diary of Mikhail Prezent, a minor literary figure, the secretary of the journal Soviet Construction. In this diary, he had recorded the gossip of his many Trotskyist acquaintances. When he was arrested by the NKVD in 1935, its head, Genrikh Yagoda, handed the diary to Stalin. In it, the dictator read that Koltsov had ridiculed his habit of ruining books by opening their uncut pages with his greasy thumb. Certainly, Prezent’s diary would also have reinforced Stalin’s suspicions of Koltsov’s Trotskyist past.129 Stalin never forgot a slight, whether real or imagined.

  Moreover, Stalin harboured a whole basket of grudges as a result of Koltsov’s role in organizing, at the Salle Mutualité in Paris in June 1935, the World Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture. In general terms, Stalin considered that Koltsov had concentrated too much on getting the participants to condemn Hitler instead of composing hymns of praise to Stalin. More specifically, he also believed that Koltsov had been the conduit for what he saw as an act of blackmail by th
e French delegates, who threatened to boycott the congress unless the USSR sent notable literary figures such as Isaak Babel or Boris Pasternak rather than party hacks. In fact, Koltsov had been trying to resolve the problems posed by the pitifully rigid performance of the hacks. Calls for more presentable Russian literary figures had come not just from the French, but also from Communist writers such as Gustav Regler. Having complied and sent Babel and Pasternak, Stalin then had to suffer the humiliation of seeing the French delegates and the Italian Gaetano Salvemini raise the case of Victor Serge, the French Trotskyist writer who had been in a Russian prison since 1933. Gide and Malraux as chairmen permitted the issue to be debated. The Russian delegates – including Koltsov, but excluding Pasternak – responded by denying that they knew anything of their fellow member of the Writers’ Union, Victor Serge. Koltsov, described by Serge as ‘a person in the innermost circle of Party confidence, a man as remarkable for his talent as for his pliant docility’, insinuated that Serge was somehow implicated in the murder in December 1934 of Stalin’s rival, the Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. Despite Koltsov’s efforts, and as a result of the scandal generated at the congress, Serge had to be released. It was another offence for which Koltsov would not be forgiven. The same was true of his fraternization with French leftists who had later become critical of the USSR. These included André Malraux but, most damagingly, André Gide, whom Koltsov had invited to Russia and permitted to meet Soviet intellectuals without NKVD vigilance. Thereafter, Koltsov was held responsible for failing to prevent the publication of Gide’s Retour de l’URSS.130 He was also regarded as failing in his duty by not producing a convincing international response that would have totally discredited Gide, despite the fact that he was by then otherwise engaged in Spain.131