by Hugh Thomas
39
During the summer, Manuel de Irujo, the minister of justice, was doing his best, with Negrín’s encouragement, and the collaboration of the Catalan councillors, to revive conventional justice: regular judges sat as chairmen of popular tribunals, prison directors were appointed from the old career service rather than by political affiliation, the biretta returned to the court, as did the republican flag over the law court building. Such radical revolutionary lawyers as Angel Samblancat and Eduardo Barriobero lost their terrifying power in Barcelona. Many who had at first greeted the revolution with enthusiasm welcomed these setbacks to it. For these acts were important victories of justice over the rule of force, predictability over arbitrariness. But there was a dark side to these occurrences. Ever since the formation of Negrín’s government, the communists had concentrated upon the persecution of the POUM. Its leaders were accused of fascism and of conspiring with Franco. The work of persecution, including arrest, interrogation, and torture, was mainly carried out by foreign communists. The Spanish communists, not knowing or not daring to guess the truth, observed what was going on and cravenly applauded, thereby causing the demoralization of the republican cause in a way which they never fully realized. Did the Catholic communist José Bergamín really believe that Nin, Gorkin and Andrade were spies? It is impossible to believe. Yet he wrote that he thought the POUM leaders had no right to any defence.1 The Prietista wing of the socialists and even the left republicans connived at these actions in a way which damaged them also. Beset by problems of war and its cruelties, they read the accounts of the alleged treachery by the POUM, and gave the benefit of the doubt—to the accusers, not the accused.
In April, the communist-controlled police in Madrid had unearthed a conspiracy by the Falange. One of the conspirators, named Castilla, was induced to become an agent provocateur. Castilla prevailed upon another falangist in the capital, Javier Golfín, to prepare a fraudulent plan for a military rising by the Fifth Column. Golfín did this, and he, and his plan, were then apprehended. Next, someone, probably the head of the Soviet espionage in Spain, Orlov, forged a letter purporting to be from Nin, a leader in the POUM, to Franco, on the back of Golfín’s plan. At about the same time, another genuine falangist, José Roca, who kept a bookshop in Gerona, was unmasked by the Catalan communists. Roca’s task in the Fifth Column was to pass on messages to a hotelier in the same town, named Dalmau. One day, sometime in May, a well-dressed individual called at the bookshop, left some money for Roca, and a message for Dalmau, and asked if he could leave a suitcase in the shop for three days. Roca agreed to his request. Not long after, the police arrived to carry out a search. Naturally, they came upon the suitcase which, when opened, was found to contain a pile of secret documents, all sealed, curiously enough, with the stamp of the POUM military committee.2
It was upon these documents, the letter from Nin to Franco, and the suitcase found in Gerona that the communist case against the POUM rested. All were forgeries.
By mid-June, the communists judged their position strong enough to take final action. They had secured the banning of the POUM’s paper, La Batalla, on 28 May. Antonov-Ovsëenko, Berzin, and Stashevsky, the most prominent Russians who had been in Spain since August 1936 (as consul-general in Barcelona, chief of the military mission and economic councillor), were all recalled in June 1937 to Moscow and vanished forever: Stashevsky had unwisely visited Moscow in April and complained to Stalin of the recklessness of the Russian secret police’s activity in Spain. But doubtless his fate was settled before that anyway.1 On 12 June, in Russia, Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other senior Russian generals were shot for ‘intrigues with Germany’. It could thus hardly have been a surprise to the communist minister of education, Jesús Hernández, when, on 14 June, he was told by Colonel Antonio Ortega, the director-general of security, that the GPU chief in Spain, Orlov, had given orders for the arrest of all the leaders of the POUM.2 Hernández went to Orlov, who insisted that the cabinet should be told nothing of the matter, since the minister of the interior, Zugazagoitia, and others, were friends of those detained. There was proof, Orlov added, of the POUM’s connection with a fascist spy-ring. Hernández went to Díaz, who was furious. Together, they went to the communist party headquarters, where a quarrel occurred. Díaz and Hernández denounced the foreign ‘advisers’. Codovilla suggested smoothly that excess of work was making Díaz ill. Why did he not take a holiday for a while? In Barcelona, meanwhile, on 16 June, on the orders of the new head of public order there, the comunizante Colonel Ricardo Burillo, the POUM headquarters at the Hotel Falcón was closed. It was immediately turned into a prison. The POUM itself was declared illegal, and forty members of its central committee arrested. Rovira, the commander of the 29th POUM Division, on the Aragon front, received a telegram to go to Barcelona to the headquarters of the Army of the East: on arrival, he was arrested.1 Small POUM battalions at the other fronts were disbanded. Andrés Nin was taken off separately, but friends found themselves in the Atocha prison in Madrid. All members of the POUM went in fear of arrest, since Stalin’s habit of visiting the alleged crimes of the leaders upon friends and families was well known. The communist newspapers screamed accusations against those whom their party had arrested, but did not bring to trial. A rumour then spread that Andrés Nin had been murdered in prison. Nin had once been Trotsky’s secretary, had worked in Russia throughout the 1920s until he had left it, and Stalinist communism, through disillusionment with its methods, and he was precisely the kind of individual whom Stalin desired dead.
Negrín sent for Hernández. He asked Nin’s whereabouts. Hernández said that he knew nothing. Negrín complained that the Russians were behaving as if Barcelona were their own country. What would happen in the cabinet that afternoon when Nin’s disappearance would be raised? Hernández promised to investigate. Codovilla told him that Nin was being interrogated. The cabinet meeting followed. At the door, journalists asked for news of Nin. Inside, Zugazagoitia demanded if his jurisdiction as minister of the interior were to be limited by Russian policemen. Prieto, Irujo, and Bernardo Giner supported this protest. Hernández and Uribe replied that they knew nothing of Nin. No one believed them, not realizing that there could be secrets even among communists. Negrín then suspended the discussion until all the facts were known.
Had they been able to purchase and transport good arms from US, British, and French manufacturers, the socialist and republican members of the Spanish government might have tried to cut themselves loose from Stalin. But non-intervention meant that the alliance with Russia could not be broken. Since the gold had already gone to Moscow, there was also little possibility of being able to buy elsewhere.
A widespread campaign in Spain and abroad now began asking, ‘Where is Nin?’ Nin, after all, was one of the internationally best-known people in the Spanish revolutionary movement. The CNT national committee sent a protest to the government, on 28 June, complaining that they needed evidence before they could believe that people such as Nin, Gorkin and Andrade were fascists, just as they would need proof to believe such an accusation against Miaja: ‘We beg, in the name of justice, constitutional legality and the right of all citizens, defended and represented by their own democracy, that the political persecution against the POUM cease.’1 Negrín begged the communist party to end the discreditable affair. The Spanish communists, who were in a scarcely better position to answer these questions than their questioners, replied that Nin was no doubt in Berlin, or Salamanca. In fact, he was almost certainly already dead.
It seems that Nin had first been taken by car from Barcelona to Orlov’s own prison, in the dilapidated ex–cathedral city of Alcalá de Henares, Azaña’s birthplace and Cervantes’s, but now almost a Russian colony. He there underwent the customary Soviet interrogation of traitors to the cause.2 His resistance to these methods was amazing. He refused to sign documents admitting his guilt and that of his friends. Orlov was at his wits’ end. So were Bielov and Vittorio Vidali, who apparently were h
is colleagues in the actual interrogation of Nin. What should they do? Orlov himself went in deadly fear of Yezhov, the insensate chief of the GPU in Russia. Eventually, according to Hernández later, the Italian Vidali (Carlos Contreras) suggested that a ‘Nazi’ attack to liberate Nin should be simulated. So, one dark night, probably 22 or 23 June, they took him to a house in Alcalá used by the (communist) head of the air force, Ignacio Hildago de Cisneros. There he was tortured but he confessed nothing. He was taken out and killed in a field halfway between Alcalá and Perales de Tajuna. Orlov with an assistant (Juzik) went to the prison in Alcalá where Nin had been held. His refusal to admit his guilt probably saved the lives of his friends. Stalin and Yezhov perhaps planned a trial in Spain on the model of the Moscow trials, with a paraphernalia of confessions; if so, they were thwarted, though, during subsequent months, the remaining POUM leaders were subjected to interrogation and torture in, for example, the convent of Saint Ursula in Barcelona, ‘the Dachau of republican Spain’ as one of its survivors described it. Although Nin was the only member of the POUM’s leadership to be killed, a number of international sympathizers with it also died in mysterious circumstances: these included Erwin Wolf, half-Czech, half-German, another ex-secretary of Trotsky, who was kidnapped in Barcelona, and never seen again; the Austrian socialist Kurt Landau; Marc Rhein, the journalist son of the old menshevik leader, Rafael Abramovich (Abramovich himself made two fruitless journeys to Spain to discover what had happened); José Robles, sometime lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, perhaps killed because he had been interpreter to the disgraced General Berzin;1 and, perhaps, ‘Bob’ Smilie, the English journalist, son of the miners’ leader of that name, who had come to Spain on behalf of the British Independent Labour party and died apparently of appendicitis, in a prison to which he had been sent without justification.
What did the members of the republican government think of this affair? It is hard to be certain: Negrín told Azaña that Nin had been detained and freed by German agents within the International Brigades. Was that not a little novelesque? asked Azaña. Not at all, Negrín said. The same sort of thing had occurred in respect of several Russian advisers at Gaylord’s Hotel, who had been poisoned by Nazi spies. Azaña noted this ‘fact’ in his diary without comment.2 The question is open whether, on the one hand, Negrín suspected the truth, and misled Azaña; or whether Negrín was deceived by the communists. It seems likely that the first was the case: and that Negrín knew it to be ‘a dirty business’, as he put it to Hernández.3 Both Azaña’s and Negrín’s attitudes to the POUM were conditioned by their irritation with what they believed to be a provocative group of revolutionaries who they thought were damaging the war effort. Nin’s councillorship of justice in Catalonia had not been distinguished by a nice concern for humanity towards the ‘bourgeoisie’, and a comment by a member of the POUM, Manuel Casanova, on the party’s brutal activities at Lérida in 1936 is a reminder that that party ‘knew how to hate’.1 This of course does not justify, but it helps to explain, the opinions of the President and the Prime Minister.
The affair of the POUM caused, in the world of communism, as great an intellectual controversy as that of the Basque priests in the world of Roman Catholicism. In some cases, the same men who protested against the Pope’s treatment of Basque priests protested against Stalin’s treatment of the POUM: for example, Mauriac, Jean Duhamel and Roger Martin du Gard wrote to the republican government to protest against the trial of the POUM, and to implore them to permit rights of defence. Ilya Ehrenburg, the one Russian writer of his generation apart from Pasternak who survived the purges in Russia and who had, as has been seen, been much in Spain, wrote in Izvestia:
I must express the sense of shame which I now feel as a man. The same day that the fascists are busy shooting the women of Asturias, there appeared in the French paper a protest against injustice … But these people did not protest against the butchers of Asturias but rather against the republic who dares to detain fascists and provocateurs of the POUM.2
Ehrenburg, alas, knew only too well how innocent were those who died in the purges, as his subsequent memoir shows.3 Meantime, George Orwell, in trying to defend the POUM in liberal England, found his articles refused by Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman.4
The republican government were doing their best to escape from the trap into which, through excessive reliance on the Russians, they had fallen. Irujo, the Basque nationalist minister of justice, named a special magistrate, Miguel Moreno Laguía, to act as a judge in the case of Nin. Moreno Laguía did detain a number of policemen who, he thought, were involved, among them a certain Vázquez. A unit of assault guards arrived to release him, while he was in the judge’s custody. When the judge protested, the guards sought to arrest him also. The judge let Vázquez go. Irujo, Prieto and Zugazagoitia threatened to resign unless Moreno were confirmed. Later, the cabinet transferred the director-general of security, Ortega, who had been responsible for the original arrest of Nin, to a field command, and eventually replaced him with Carlos de Juan, the chief prosecutor of the republic. Judge Moreno Laguía continued vainly looking for Nin, while Nin’s companions remained months more in gaol before being brought to trial,1 and his presumed murderers continued in influential positions. During the latter part of 1937, a number of the POUM rank and file were also ruthlessly shot, after summary courts-martial manned by the communists.2 According to Gorkin, meantime, there were about 1,500 ‘antifascist prisoners’—anarchists, POUMistas, others—in the Model Prison in Valencia in late 1937.
The crimes against the POUM were acts of barbarity carried out in Spain by Spanish and foreign communists at the behest of the republic’s only, and over-powerful, ally, Russia. The POUM had few friends, in Spain or outside. The repression against this party was sanctioned by most supporters of the Popular Front, and was scarcely a cause of complaint even by the anarchists. Azaña, Negrín, and Prieto, to name only three representative men, were plainly worried by the case of Nin, though the latter two perhaps less by the outrage itself than by the effect caused outside Spain. Azaña, and with him thousand of others, regarded the death of Nin and the suppression of the POUM as an acceptable exchange, in time of war, for the virtual end, under communist police, of the undisciplined killings of the first months, and for the embourgeoisement of, and the state’s capture of, the revolution. They had no sympathy with the revolutionary aims of the POUM, no personal feeling for Nin. There were accusations made at the time, which have not been substantiated or fully disproved, that certain POUM leaders, as well as anarchists, had taken care to place money or valuables which they had seized in the early days of the revolution in France.1 Azaña looked on Russia as ‘the man whom one admits to society because it is impossible to do otherwise, but who is the friend of nobody’.2 But the crime reverberates through the years, as do all the contemporaneous crimes in Russia. Thereafter, in fact, the communists in Spain were more circumspect. No other major political personality was detained. This was perhaps due to the full-time presence of the astute Togliatti as chief representative of the Comintern in the Spanish communist party from the summer onwards.3 Still, there were many people unjustly in gaol for the remainder of the civil war and even the lawyer of the POUM, Benito Pabón, found himself so threatened that he fled the country; he went as far as he could to escape the vengeance of the communists and settled in the Philippines.
40
After the capture of the Basque provinces, General Franco paused before falling upon Santander, the next republican centre in the north. The republic then launched its long-discussed diversionary offensive in the centre. That, as expected, was the communist choice of Brunete. Two army corps had been gathered, under the overall command of Miaja. These were the 5th Army Corps, led by Modesto, and the 18th Army Corps, led by Jurado, an artillery officer. The former comprised Lister’s 11th Division, El Campesino’s 46th Division, and Walter’s 35th Division, while Jurado’s corps included Gal, with the 15th Division (the
11th and 14th International Brigades). In reserve, Kléber returned to command the 45th Division and Gustavo Durán, Kléber’s chief of staff during the winter, commanded the 39th Division. The communist influence in this army was extensive. They had five out of six divisional commanders; one army corps commander; and the commissars of the two army corps were communists (Delage and Zapiraín). So was Miaja’s commissar—Francisco Antón. This army numbered 85,000. It was supported by 40 armoured cars, 300 aircraft, 130 tanks and over 220 field guns. The aim was to advance towards the stagnant village of Brunete (population 1,556, in 1935) from the north of the El Escorial–Madrid road so as to cut off all the besiegers of the capital from the west.1 Rojo, the chief of staff of the army, expected the republicans to achieve these aims before Franco’s reinforcements could arrive.
The 15th International Brigade, led by the Croat communist C? opíc, was used in this battle as a shock force,2 along with the 11th Brigade of Germans, now led by Colonel Staimer, and the 13th, chiefly Slavs and French, led by the Italian communist ‘Krieger’ (Vincenzo Bianco). Later on, Pacciardi’s Garibaldi (12th) Brigade, mainly Italians, played a part.3 Russian advisers were, of course, present, among them General Stern (Grigorovich) as senior adviser, and Smushkevich, still at the head of the air mission. Numerous Russian pilots were still with the republican air force. The planning of the attack was the responsibility of Matallana, new chief of staff to Miaja.
