Authors: Preston Paul
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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. Although 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.
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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:
There are some people who are wondering why we, the Soviet writers, support the vigorous and pitiless measures of our government against traitors, spies and enemies of the people. These people ask how, despite being good Soviet patriots, as well as workers with peace-loving and defensive pens, can we leave all this to the immovable instruments of state and keep our distance from it; why we do not interfere and simply keep quiet about it, not drawing attention to it in the pages of our publications. No, colleagues and comrades, for us this is a matter of honour. The honour of the Soviet writer consists precisely in being at the forefront in the battle against treachery, against any attack on the liberty and independence of our people. We support our government and justify its actions not only because they are just but because [our government] will lead us to abundance and happiness. We support it because it is strong, its hand does not shake when punishing the enemy. Why are we fighting Franco now, when he has occupied the Spanish lands with the Foreign Legion, Moroccan infantry and German aircraft, and why was nothing done before when the same Franco was plotting his treachery? How many hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved in Spain, how many bullets, shells and bombs would not have done their murderous work if a military tribunal and a firing squad had eliminated the treacherous generals at a suitable moment? Our country is completely safeguarded against the adventures of big and small Francos. It is safeguarded because the Soviet security forces will stop the little Trotskyite Francos before they can start and the military tribunal, with support from the people, will punish them.
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Hemingway also quoted Koltsov/Karkov speaking with conviction of the need to shoot certain treacherous generals.
91
Ehrenburg, who was also a delegate, was surprised by the number of Soviet writers who referred to the liquidation in Russia of ‘enemies of the people’. He asked several of them why and they refused to answer. When he commented on this to Koltsov, he grunted: ‘Serves you right. You shouldn’t ask.’
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It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Koltsov was whistling in the dark, eulogizing the security services partly to underline his own reliability but also to make them seem less frightening to himself. Yet Koltsov was not alone in using the Spanish Civil War to justify the Soviet Terror. The German scholar Frank Schauff has identified a significant body of contemporary propaganda output justifying the Terror with reference to the Spanish Civil War, something he has called ‘the Spanish parable of Terror’. Thus Koltsov, in this speech, was not doing anything exceptional but merely going along with the thrust of the mainstream Soviet press of those years. Koltsov and others wrote about Spain, but ‘Spain’ was read as meaning the Soviet Union. After all, if the moderate Spanish Republic and the incipient popular revolution were the victims of a major assault by the principal fascist powers, then it is inevitable that the Soviet Union, which is much richer and more tempting, is a target for fascist aggression. In order to face this attack and avoid the fate of the Spanish Republic, awareness of the hidden enemy within must be intensified.
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Shortly after his return to Spain, Koltsov had to witness the successive and deeply painful losses of the Basque Country, Santander and Asturias. He was also aware of the crippling cost to the Republic of the pyrrhic victories at Brunete and Belchite. Nevertheless, his optimism and enthusiasm for the Republic endured. His friend Claude Cockburn commented:
As the Spanish War ground its way to its gruesome conclusion, and all over Europe people who had supported the Republic became truly cynical, despairing, without faith or enthusiasm for anything, I found myself looking forward more and more eagerly to conversations with Koltsov, journeys in his company, estimates from him of the course of affairs. He was a man who could see the defeat for what it really was, could assume that half the big slogans were empty, and a lot of the big heroes stuffed, or charlatans, and yet not let that bother him at all, or sap his energy and enthusiasm.
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Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that Koltsov derived much satisfaction from following orders to write in praise of the NKVD’s efforts
to annihilate Trotskyism in Spain, since the affair had such echoes of what was happening to many of his friends at home. Viscount Chilston, the British Ambassador in Moscow, saw considerable significance in an article by Koltsov sent from Lérida and published in
Pravda
on 26 August. In it, Koltsov deplored the failure of the Spanish Republican authorities to take adequate steps against Trotskyists in Spain and repeated the story that Andreu Nin had escaped from prison with the help of a group of agents of the Gestapo. He went on to complain that the remainder of the Trotskyist leaders, though in prison, are treated too leniently and that the POUM newspaper,
Batalla,
although forbidden, continued to appear in an eight-page edition. The article claimed that Nin and the Spanish Trotskyists had been in cahoots with General Franco since 1935. Viscount Chilston went on:
The foregoing considerations, the article continues, should serve as a lesson to those in Spain who are inclined to underestimate the Trotskist menace and dismiss it as a private quarrel of the Communist Party. The Trotskists are in fact the most dangerous detachment of Fascism. ‘Woe’, M. Koltsov concludes in a somewhat biblical strain, ‘to those who do not see this danger or who do not wish to see it! Woe to those who make it possible for the Trotskist spies to continue their activities with impunity!’ The present article, it will be seen, lays considerable stress on the menace which Trotskism constitutes to the Republican cause in Spain and criticises the Republican leaders in no measured terms for their failure to realise this and to take suitable action to avert the danger. Possibly this outburst merely forms part of the perennial anti-Trotskist drive which accounts for at least half the space in the Soviet press. It may be, on the other hand, that its purpose is to prepare the way in the case of a Republican debacle in Spain, which would then be attributed to the activities of Trotskists and to lack of vigilance on the part of the Republican leaders.
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