Authors: Preston Paul
Koltsov may have been painfully embarrassed to have to write such blatant untruths, an obligation imposed on every Soviet journalist at
the time. Yet he had long since thrown in his lot with Stalin. With regard to Koltsov’s contribution to the international propaganda offensive aimed at justifying the trial of the POUM and by implication that of Kameniev and Zinoviev, Leon Trotsky wrote: ‘The entire press of the Communist International, fettered to Stalin by a golden chain, launched itself into an orgy of calumnies whose obscenity and baseness are without precedent. The role of leader of the orchestra has been assumed by such emissaries of Moscow as Mikhail Koltsov, Willi Münzenberg and other scum.’
What was going on around him in Spain and what was happening to friends in Moscow was preying ever more on his mind. When he was recalled, on 6 November 1937, Koltsov, aware of the worsening situation, persuaded Maria Osten not to join him. He arranged for her to be appointed as the
Deutsche Zentral Zeitung
correspondent in Paris.
96
On his return to Russia, he had short meetings with Stalin on 9 and 14 November. There cannot have been much time to discuss the Spanish situation in any detail since, nearly three weeks later, Koltsov wrote to request an interview with Stalin in order to review a lengthy list of issues relating to Republican Spain. There is no record of any such encounter in Stalin’s desk diary, although this does not mean that they did not meet elsewhere or talk on the telephone.
97
Koltsov set himself the immediate task of converting his
Pravda
despatches into a book. A number of his reports and memories from Spain appeared in
Literaturnaya Gazeta.
The first part of his Diary of the Spanish Civil War appeared, to considerable critical acclaim, between April and September 1938 in the mass-circulation journal of the Soviet Writers’ Association
Novyi Mir,
under the title
‘
Ispanskii dnevnik’.
98
On 19 December 1937, Koltsov published an article in
Pravda
criticizing the informers who denounced their comrades. He recounted the story of a student who had been accused in a letter of duplicity, careerism and sycophancy. Without investigating the flimsy accusations, the party secretary of the Moscow institute where the boy was studying had simply accepted them and expelled him both from the party and the college as an enemy of the people. Koltsov roundly berated those who, to protect themselves, were ready to smear the innocent and claimed that the party, the government, the courts and public opinion would put
a stop to such heartless liars who violated the rights of Soviet citizens. On 17 January 1938, he published a sequel in which he classified the mendacious informers as ‘spear-chuckers’ who would hurl their accusations randomly in order to strike down as many as possible and thus seem to be politically reliable and cover up their own dirty record; ‘careerists’ who informed on people in order to dominate their institutions and get promotion; and the ‘cowardly and soulless bureaucrats’ who would unquestioningly take action on the basis of groundless accusations. Soon, he wrote, the NKVD would put a stop to those guilty of such calumnies and slanders because they were contrary to the Soviet order. The articles had managed both to denounce widespread, and officially encouraged, practices, while suggesting that the regime was utterly opposed to them and would root them out. The motivations behind them were both personal and official. The articles clearly reflected an order from on high since, on 19 January 1938, a Central Committee decree was published on the errors of party organizations that expelled innocent members. At the same time, they allowed him to write about something that he found deeply disturbing.
99
Vladimir Gorev’s interpreter and lover Emma Wolf recounted a scene shortly after their return to Moscow, and before the disappearance of Gorev himself. They had been invited to a reception to celebrate the return from Spain of another of the ‘advisers’. As they drank Soviet ‘champagne’ (sparkling wine from the Crimea), Koltsov asked her how she was finding her new job at
Izvestiya.
She told him that she was distraught to find that many of her old friends and colleagues had disappeared. Koltsov said nothing, just smiled sadly and shrugged his shoulders.
100
Clearly worried by the prevailing situation, Koltsov tried to present himself as a champion of Stalinist orthodoxy. On 11 March 1938, he wrote to his friend, the German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, about the ongoing purge trials. He described how he had sat for a week in the courtroom, ‘rendered speechless by the mountains of filth and crime’.
101
Despite his growing fears, certain issues brought forth the old courage. When Louis Fischer, who was in the process of breaking his ties with the Soviet Union, visited Moscow at the end of May 1938, none of his friends came to see him. They were too scared. Koltsov, however, took the risk of showing up at the home
of the American. He was desperate for news from Spain. Fischer commented: ‘Koltsov was very emotional about Spain. But when talking to strangers he wrapped himself in a smoke-screen which consisted of equal parts of brittle
Pravda
-editorial prose and literary spoofing. That made him seem pompous and cynical.’
102
Through his newspaper articles, he also remained one of the most authoritative official voices, protecting himself by participating in the public denunciation of the accused in the Moscow purge trials. His attacks on Nikolai Bukharin were especially vehement.
103
There is reason to suppose that Koltsov’s vehemence was defensive. One day, Lev Mekhlis, the editor of
Pravda,
had told Koltsov that a trusted colleague named Avgust was a spy. Mekhlis was close to Stalin and was often given advance notice of those under suspicion in order to prepare their public humiliation through the pages of the newspaper. Shocked, Koltsov replied that Avgust was a trusted Bolshevik who had been imprisoned under the Tsarist regime. Mekhlis replied that this counted for nothing because the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret service, recruited people just like Avgust. Yet, when Avgust himself came into the office, Mekhlis greeted him effusively. Koltsov told his brother that he had begun to fear that Mekhlis, who had previously been his protector, was harbouring some sort of suspicion. Koltsov now realized how little he could trust his boss.
104
According to Boris Efimov, in the last weeks before his arrest, Koltsov
worked furiously, almost obsessively, almost without respite, as if to escape his tortured thoughts. He believed deeply, honestly – and I am not afraid to say this – almost fanatically in Stalin’s wisdom. My brother often told me in detail of his encounters with ‘The Master’
(khozyain),
of his mannerisms in conversation, his remarks, turns of phrase and his jokes. He loved everything about Stalin.
However, another incident with Mekhlis in the late summer of 1938 intensified Koltsov’s fears. He told Boris Efimov about a visit he had made to the new office of Mekhlis, shortly after he had been promoted
to be head of the main political directorate of the armed forces. Mekhlis had shown him a thick green NKVD file containing the declarations of a recently arrested editor of
Izvestiya,
B. M. Tal. On it, in red pencil, was scribbled Stalin’s order to both Mekhlis and Yezhov ordering them to arrest all those named in Tal’s deposition.
Afterwards, nervously pacing up and down, Koltsov commented to Boris Efimov:
I think and I think but I can’t understand anything. What is going on? How did it turn out that we suddenly have so many enemies? These are people that we’ve known for years, that we lived with cheek-by-jowl for years! Army commanders, Civil War heroes, party veterans! And for some reason, no sooner have they disappeared behind bars than they immediately confess that they are enemies of the people, spies, agents of foreign intelligence services. What’s going on? I think I’m going out of my mind. Surely, as a member of the editorial board of
Pravda,
a well-known journalist, a parliamentary deputy, I should be able to explain to others the meaning of what is going on, the reasons for so many denunciations and arrests. But in fact I, like any terrified petty bourgeois, know nothing, understand nothing. I am bewildered, in the dark. Somebody perhaps, somewhere, maybe Yezhov, just gave vent to his [Stalin’s] suspicions, hastily concocting all these conspiracies and betrayals? Or it was he [Stalin], himself, who constantly and eagerly encouraged Yezhov, mocking him for not being able to see the traitors and spies under his nose?
105
At the end of September 1938, Koltsov was sent to Prague to report for
Pravda
on the Czech situation in the immediate wake of Munich, but before the arrival of German troops. What he saw as the last chance to stop Hitler deeply depressed him and was a bitter blow to his anti-fascist faith.
106
While there, he coincided with his friend Claud Cockburn, who was again reminded of the intensity with which Koltsov’s anti-fascism burned. The episode in Prague provides another clue to Koltsov’s fall from grace, since his enthusiasm for a possible Soviet intervention in
favour of Czechoslovakia suggested that it was inevitable that he would have opposed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Cockburn was moving between London, Paris, Geneva and Prague both as diplomatic correspondent and reporter of the
Daily Worker,
as well as reporting for his own satirical news-sheet
The Week
and for a big new illustrated publication in Chicago called
Ken.
Then, in the autumn of 1938, Koltsov had appointed him London correspondent of
Pravda,
a position he held only briefly because Koltsov himself disappeared soon after.
Cockburn wrote:
I do not know to this day what Koltsov had done or was supposed to have done in Moscow. His fall – and one presumes execution – came at the height of his power there, and a lot of people when they heard of it could not believe it. They spread stories that he had been sent to China as a top-secret agent under another name. A lot of his friends went on believing that for years, as a kind of wishful thinking to soften their grief. Others were thrown into total disarray by the news, became despairing and totally cynical. For myself, though I missed him more than anyone I had known during that time, I cannot say I was surprised. And, oddly, I doubt if he was much surprised either. He had lived – and talked and joked – very dangerously, and he had absolutely no illusions so far as I know about the nature of the dangers. (Possibly his active taste for dangerous living had led him into some major conspiracy.) He would not, I thought, have been otherwise than satirically amused by some of the almost hysterically sentimental outcries which greeted his removal.
107
Koltsov’s earlier comment to Regler about keeping his glasses on in front of a firing squad had made it clear that he believed that eventual disgrace was highly likely. By the early autumn of 1938, he seems to have regarded it as inevitable. A meeting recalled by Cockburn suggested as much:
Curiously enough, he once – a few weeks before his fall – entertained me at lunch with a kind of fantastic burlesque based
on the imaginary future trial of himself for counterrevolutionary activities, taking in turn the part of a grimly furious Public Prosecutor and of himself in the role of a clown who has been caught out and still cannot resist making fatal jokes. This was in Prague at the height of the Munich crisis.
Cockburn, like Koltsov, was entirely aware of the desperate nature of the situation in Prague at the end of September and the beginning of October 1938:
I spent a lot of time with Koltsov at the Russian Legation, for that was the place where, if anything decisive were to happen, it would happen. And I knew that Koltsov was at least as important a figure on the stage as the Russian Minister, and perhaps much more important because of his double position at
Pravda
and at the Kremlin.
108
Cockburn forgot that Koltsov did not really hold a double position since
Pravda
was the organ of the Kremlin.
Koltsov seemed still to entertain hopes of Britain, France and the Soviet Union uniting on behalf of Czechoslovakia against Germany. The Czechoslovak army had been mobilized and was in fortified positions on the German frontier. Cockburn’s account gave an improbably prominent role to Koltsov. He claimed that, in anticipation of Czech resistance against a Nazi invasion, an advance force of fighter planes and bombers had been secretly sent to Prague, and that the Soviet Ambassador and Koltsov were authorized to inform President Eduard Bene? that Russia was ready to send troops, artillery and aircraft when hostilities began. This is also a considerable exaggeration. For the USSR to aid Czechoslovakia, it would have required both the commitment of France and permission from Warsaw and Bucharest for Soviet troops to be transported through Poland and Romania to Czechoslovakia. Louis Fischer reported that Pierre Cot, the French Air Minister and Soviet sympathizer, told him that between May and September 1938, the USSR delivered three hundred aircraft to the Czechs. He also quotes Soviet documents to the effect that the Kremlin had put the Red air
force on a war footing and was prepared to send 246 bombers and 302 fighters to Czechoslovakia.
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