We Saw Spain Die (39 page)

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.
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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 the 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.
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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.
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News of Koltsov’s detention spread quickly. In intellectual circles, the notion that such a man, apparently a trusted patriotic hero and disseminator of the party line, could have fallen foul of the authorities generated first disbelief then panic. The demise of Yezhov had briefly raised hopes of an end to the purges, but Beria was soon to outdo both Yezhov and Yagoda in brutality. The British Embassy in Moscow reported: ‘During the past fortnight, i.e. since Beria’s formal accession to power there have been the usual arrests and rumours of arrests and there is no indication of any falling off in the “purge”.’ After mentioning Koltsov’s arrest and, presumably erroneously, that of Boris Efimovich, the despatch went on:

We also learn on good authority that Nikolayev, who was head of the Special Section of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs under Yezhov, has been arrested as an enemy of the people, and it is even said that Yezhov’s wife has been taken from the newspaper office where she worked. There seems to be little doubt that Yezhov is slipping fast. In spite of this, his portraits are still for sale in the shops and MacLean, on the occasion of his recent visit to the precincts of the Lubiyanka, was amused to notice in the room where he was received a life-sized portrait of the former ‘master’ and none of the new.
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Koltsov was astonished to discover that the semi-literate agent who took his first statement started to talk about his alleged involvement in an anti-Stalin conspiracy, along with all those major writers and poets not already in jail. The principal accusation was that he and Evgeni Gnedin, the press chief at the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, were the ringleaders of an anti-Soviet plot involving intellectuals and diplomats. He had allegedly been recruited by the American, the French and the German Intelligence services. His extra-marital relationship with his German lover, Maria Osten, was regarded as proof. He was also accused
of being an agent of Trotsky and of having collaborated with the POUM in Spain. Questioned by Beria’s top interrogators Lev Shvartsman and Leonid Raikhman, Koltsov was tortured and finally signed statements admitting connections with a whole range of suspect individuals, some already executed, some under arrest and others still in high positions.

Gnedin survived to write memoirs in which he described being confronted with Koltsov in August 1939. The interrogators brought Koltsov into the room and Gnedin was shocked by how tired and worn he seemed. Nevertheless, Koltsov’s eyes lit up when he saw his friend. It was a rare flash of the intelligence and humour which reminded Gnedin of the Koltsov of better times. He even managed a joke: ‘Just look at you, Gnedin,’ he grimaced, and paused before saying: ‘Well, as bad as me, actually.’ Gnedin found him a sick, broken man, weary from the months of arrest. Part of his disorientation came from the fact that his glasses had been taken from him and, as he had told Regler, without them ‘everything looks black to me’. Thus, he was ready to admit anything of which he was accused. When he was asked to confess to conspiring with Gnedin and other journalists and diplomats against the Soviet state, he recited parrot-like a story that they had plotted at the apartment of Konstantin A. Umanskii, the Soviet Ambassador to the USA. Gnedin denied all knowledge of this.
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The interrogators had squeezed plenty out of Koltsov. He admitted that he had been friendly with Karl Radek. He had slept with Yezhov’s wife, confessing to ‘seducing’ her. He had been recruited for French Intelligence by André Malraux. He had worked in Spain with the notorious NKVD defector, Aleksandr Orlov, somewhat ironic given that Orlov himself had been sent to Spain in September 1936 ostensibly as a political attaché with the exclusive task of combating Trotskyism, a task he had fulfilled with savage efficiency. Koltsov made the preposterous admission that he had links with the POUM. Shvartsman and Raikhman produced lists of those he was required to implicate, including the writers Babel, Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg and Aleksei Tolstoi, and diplomats including the Soviet Ambassadors Ivan Maisky in London, Konstantin Umanskii in Washington, right up to Maxim Litvinov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He signed everything put in front of him.
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Within a few days of the arrest, Aleksandr Fadeiev, the influential Chairman of the Union of Writers, courageously sent a note to Stalin
expressing doubts that Koltsov could have committed any kind of crime against the Soviet state, and requesting an audience to discuss the case. Barely a week before Koltsov’s arrest, Fadeiev had published with Aleksei Tolstoi an article praising the Spanish diary as ‘excellent, passionate, brave and poetic’.
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Some months later, Stalin received Fadeiev and sent him into another room accompanied by Poskrëbyshev (Stalin’s personal assistant), who gave him the two green folders with Koltsov’s ‘confessions’. After Fadeiev had read them, Stalin asked: ‘So, now do you believe this?’ to which an extremely uncomfortable Fadeiev answered: ‘I have to.’ Fadeiev later told members of the union, including Konstantin Simonov, that the declarations were terrifying, that Koltsov had ‘admitted’ to being a spy, a Trotskyist and a POUMista.
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By August 1939, the NKVD had enough material to bring formal charges against Koltsov and Gnedin, of masterminding the anti-Soviet conspiracy of intellectuals and diplomats. Koltsov was tried under the infamous Article 58 of the Criminal Code, dealing with anti-Soviet, that is to say political, crimes, which served as the legal basis for the show trials.

When Koltsov was rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, the official documentation revealed that he was tried for ‘participation in an anti-Soviet conspiracy, espionage and carrying out anti-Soviet agitation’.
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At his twenty-minute trial on 1 February 1940, Koltsov retracted his ‘confessions’ on the grounds that they had been extracted by means of horrific tortures.
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He was found guilty and shot the same night or early the next morning. Ever since the assassination of Kirov on 1 December 1934, those sentenced to capital punishment usually had to be shot on the day that the decision was taken and no revision was possible. Nevertheless, Vasily Ulrikh, who presided at the trial, lied to Boris Efimov when he told him that Koltsov had been sentenced to ‘ten years without right of correspondence’ and thus was alive in a camp in the Urals. Ulrikh also blithely told Boris Efimov that ‘for Koltsov to have been arrested, there had to have been proper authority for it’.
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Koltsov was cremated and left in a common grave of unclaimed bodies at the Monastery of Donskoi in Moscow.
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It is not known if his glasses had been returned to him before he faced the firing squad.

Some, but far from all, of those implicated by his ‘confessions’ were also shot. Gnedin served fifteen years in a concentration camp but survived to write the memoirs in which he described his ‘confrontation’
with Koltsov. Konstantin Umanskii, the Soviet Ambassador to the USA, died in an accident in Mexico and was buried with honours in Moscow. Koltsov’s lover Maria Osten also met with a tragic fate. Against the advice of her friends in Paris, on hearing of Koltsov’s arrest, she had immediately journeyed to Moscow in the hope of being able to help him.
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When she arrived, with the now five-year-old Jusik, Hubert L’Hoste, fearful of being associated with ‘an enemy of the people’ after Koltsov’s arrest, rejected her. When she asked, ‘Do you really believe for a minute that nightmare about Mikhail?’, he responded: ‘Do you think everyone around you is mistaken? How can one individual be more intelligent and correct than everyone else?’ Recently married and wanting the Koltsov apartment for himself and his new bride, he barred the door to Maria and Jusik, who had to go to a seedy hotel.

Convinced of Koltsov’s innocence, Maria stayed on and took work as a translator at the Writers’ Union. Few of their old friends had time for her, although Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros was one of those who did. When she appealed for help to the exiled leadership of the German Communist Party, Walter Ulbricht refused and recommended that she be investigated as someone who had benefited from the protection of Koltsov. Unaware of the KPD investigation, as late as the summer of 1939, she was optimistic that Koltsov would soon be freed. However, on 14 October 1939, Ulbricht’s machinations bore fruit when she was expelled from the Communist Party on the grounds of ‘insufficient engagement with Party history and the theory of Marxism-Leninism’. In a vain attempt to find security, she took Soviet citizenship. On 22 June 1941, the day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, she was arrested as a Nazi spy and her adopted son Jusik taken away. Her relationship with Koltsov was regarded as proof of guilt, just as Koltsov’s guilt was taken as proven by his relationship with Osten. Despite the most horrendous tortures, she refused to ‘confess’ to being a Gestapo agent and was shot in the late summer of 1942. In 1947, Hubert L’Hoste was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and sent to a concentration camp in Siberia. He was released after the death of Stalin and died in 1959.
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O
n many mornings, while shaving and then while soaking in the bath, the Republican prime minister, Juan Negrín, would discuss the international situation in German with a journalist who sat on the toilet seat. Negrín was a man of enormous energy and even greater talent who had little time for the niceties of protocol. To maintain a war effort required an endless struggle with the twin problems of controlling the disparate component forces within Republican politics and of trying to reverse the British, French and American policies of non-intervention that deprived the Republic of the capacity to defend itself. Although immensely discreet, he would take advice where he thought it was useful and evidently one such place was in his bathroom. The man on the toilet seat also dispensed advice to senior Soviet leaders, albeit not at the same time. He was an inveterate traveller whose family lived in Moscow. In the same apartment building lived the notoriously prickly Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov. Negrín’s friend, who also spoke fluent Russian, had gained Litvinov’s confidence to the extent that they would regularly sit in the evenings with children on their laps discussing burning issues of international relations. This German- and Russian-speaking newspaperman was actually an American and one with unusually direct access to the highest circles in Washington, where he had little difficulty in getting to talk to Cordell Hull or Eleanor Roosevelt. Tall, darkly saturnine with hooded eyes, Louis Fischer cut a striking figure among the correspondents in Spain.

The contacts enjoyed among Spanish, Russian and American leaders by Louis Fischer gave a remarkable authority to what he wrote. The bulk of Fischer’s writing during the Spanish Civil War was first for the New York left-wing weekly
The Nation
and the
New Statesman and Nation
of London and then syndicated to more newspapers. Accordingly, his
articles are much longer and more reflective than most journalistic despatches during the conflict. In consequence, they fully repay close reading even today. It has been suggested that Fischer constituted ‘the clearest case of complete commitment and almost total abandonment of objectivity’ among the foreign correspondents.
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There can be no doubt about his commitment, although it was hardly greater than that of Herbert Matthews or Jay Allen, or many other respected newspapermen. His vivid and well-informed articles were clearly pro-Republican, but cannot be described as propaganda in the negative sense.