Authors: Preston Paul
The memoirs of Karmen confirm Boris Efimov’s view that Koltsov’s official status was largely journalistic. He says that they were inseparable and that ‘our friendship constituted a priceless education in militant journalism’. He often accompanied Koltsov as he moved around Madrid, visiting the defences, and claimed that he would read Koltsov’s chronicles in
Pravda
a couple of days later, and was able to relive what
they had seen, illuminated by what he called ‘a divine spark, the wise, sharp and joyous spark of Koltsov’s immense talent’. Karmen was entranced by the sheer energy and many facets of Koltsov: ‘an acute chronicler of extraordinary events, a political being, an intrepid soldier’, who also liked to live well and was always cheerful and jovial.
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By the time that Hemingway arrived in the spring of 1937, Koltsov and Karmen had moved from the Hotel Florida, briefly to the Hotel Capitol on the other side of the Gran Vía, then to the Hotel Palace in the Carrera de San Jerónimo and then on to Gaylord’s Hotel in Alfonso XII.
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Many of those who met Koltsov left descriptions. He was small, very Spanish-looking, had thick black hair and wore thick-lensed round spectacles. In a clearly autobiographical section of
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
Hemingway proclaimed him
the most intelligent man he had ever met. Wearing black riding boots, grey breeches, and a grey tunic, with tiny hands and feet, puffily fragile of face and body, with a spitting way of talking through his bad teeth, he looked comic…but he had more brains and more inner dignity and outer insolence and humour than anybody he had ever known.
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Koltsov provided Hemingway with considerable amounts of material that was later incorporated into
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
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Orlov claimed that everything in Hemingway’s portrayal of Koltsov in the form of the character of Karkov was exact.
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Martha Gellhorn met Koltsov for the first time at a party in his warm and cosy room at the Hotel Gaylord. Writing at the end of her life, she remembered seeing ‘a small thin man, with thick, well-cut, grey hair. He wore a dark, excellent suit. He had the kind of face that makes an immediate impression of brilliance, of wit, and the quiet manners of complete confidence. I thought he was forty or so, and more French than Russian.’
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As the comments of Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Emma Wolf, Roman Karmen, Paulina Abramson and others attest, Koltsov had a capacity to amuse, to impress and to generate affection and enthusiasm. The English Communist journalist, Claud Cockburn, became a close friend, as attracted as Karmen had been by Koltsov’s wit and energy:
I spent a great deal of my time in the company of Mikhail Koltsov, who then was Foreign Editor
of Pravda
and, more importantly still, was at that period – he disappeared later in Russia, presumed shot – the confidant and mouthpiece and direct agent of Stalin himself. He was a stocky little Jew from Odessa, I think – with a huge head and one of the most expressive faces of any man I ever met. What his face principally expressed was a kind of enthusiastically gleeful amusement – and a lively hope that you and everyone else would, however depressing the circumstances, do your best to make things more amusing still.
Cockburn described how easily Koltsov could provoke resentment and jealousy:
He had a savagely satirical tongue – and an attitude of entire ruthlessness towards people he thought either incompetent or even just pompous. People who did not know him well – particularly non-Russians – thought his conversation, his sharply pointed Jewish jokes, his derisive comments on all kinds of Sacred Cows, unbearably cynical. And others, who had known them both, said that he reminded them of Karl Radek (an ominous comparison). To myself it never seemed that anyone who had such a powerful enthusiasm for life – for the humour of life, for all manifestations of vigorous life from a tank battle to Elizabethan literature to a good circus – could possibly be described properly as ‘cynical’. Realistic is perhaps the word – but that is not quite correct either, because it implies, or might imply, a dry practicality which was quite lacking from his nature. At any rate so far as his personal life and fate were concerned he unquestionably and positively enjoyed the sense of danger, and sometimes – by his political indiscretions, for instance, or his still more wildly indiscreet love affairs – deliberately created dangers which need not have existed.
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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.
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Ilya Ehrenburg commented: ‘the friendship which he professed towards me was tainted by a touch of contempt’.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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There is certainly evidence that he went to the front with Maria Osten and little doubt that she was the love of his life.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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However, this does not mean that Koltsov, any more than the Soviet Ambassador Marcel Rosenberg or the General 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.
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