Authors: Preston Paul
After a week in the south of Spain, he went on to Barcelona, whence he took a ship to Genoa. As he had written to Freda, ‘I want to see Vesuvius spout and perhaps – I know I am sanguine – hear Mussolini
do the same.’ In the event, the interview with the Duce did not materialize. After a brief interlude in Paris with Markoosha, he returned to Russia for the shared birthday, 4 May, of his two sons.
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Accordingly, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War found Fischer in Moscow but, regarding Spain as ‘the front line against Fascism, I gladly left Russia to be close to the battle’.
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After a holiday in Czechoslovakia, he journeyed to Paris, took a train to Toulouse and after a night in the station hotel, left at 6 a.m. on 16 September 1936 on the regular ten-passenger Air France flight to Barcelona.
Two days later, he wrote in his diary:
I am full of impressions and information. If I am bombarded in this way much longer I shall forget things I would like to remember and record. The brain makes a little comment, a picture flashes before one’s eyes in the street or on the aerodrome, one feels an emotion. […] But this civil war situation is so rich, thrilling and interesting that I hate to lose any of it.
After some delay, he managed to get on a plane which, after failing to cross the mountains to Madrid, landed in Valencia. There, after further interruptions, it was decided to proceed by car, but appalling weather persuaded him to wait until he could get a train to the capital. To his amazement, no one would let him pay for his travel or his food. He went for a walk and was equally fascinated to hear discussions between anarchists, who wanted to collectivize everything, and Socialists and Communists, who argued that it was ridiculous to want to confiscate the property of small businessmen and artisans. When his train finally reached Madrid, after an incident-packed night, there were no taxis to be found at the station, so he and Victor Schiff of the London
Daily Herald
hired the only available vehicle – a double-decker bus – to take them to the Hotel Florida.
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In Madrid, Fischer quickly re-established contact with the Spaniards he had met on his previous visits. First among them was his closest friend, Luis Araquistain. By now editor of the left-Socialist daily,
Claridad,
Araquistain was in a curiously contradictory position. For
most of his life, Araquistain had oscillated within a narrow political spectrum of liberalism, Fabianism and social democracy. However, from 1933 to 1937, he was the theoretician behind the adoption of revolutionary rhetoric by the Spanish Socialist leader, Francisco Largo Caballero. Araquistain’s radicalism was the result of a frustrating spell as Undersecretary of Labour and Social Welfare under Largo Caballero and what he saw as Spanish Ambassador in Berlin in 1932 and 1933. Witnessing the rise of Nazism and its appalling consequences, he became an advocate of a united working-class revolutionary response to fascism. He came to despair of Socialist participation in bourgeois democracy as a determined and aggressive right wing blocked all attempts at reform. Through the pages of his journal
Leviatán,
Araquistain argued that the only choice lay between fascist or socialist dictatorship. It was at this time that he coined the phrase ‘the Spanish Lenin’ to describe Largo Caballero. He argued for the Bolshevization of the party and the adoption of Leninist tactics. At first, radicalization carried the PSOE nearer to the Communists, but Araquistain, like Largo Caballero, opposed the popular front policy because it meant further collaboration with bourgeois liberals. Ironically, popular frontism was to bring together the Communists and the right Socialists led by Largo Caballero’s arch-rival Indalecio Prieto. This would eventually bring about a bitter confrontation between Araquistain and his brother-in-law, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, which would inevitably affect Araquistain’s relationship with Fischer.
In September, Álvarez del Vayo had just been made Foreign Minister, apparently because Prieto had vetoed Araquistain, Largo Caballero’s first choice. Uncomfortable about having his brother-in-law as his boss, Araquistain was about to go to Paris as Republican Ambassador. When Fischer met him, he did not hesitate to give Araquistain forthright advice on the military situation. In particular, he was amazed by the government’s failure to break the resistance of the rebel troops besieged in the Alcázar of Toledo. He pointed out that the deadlock over the Alcázar was damaging the government’s military strategy by immobilizing thousands of men who might have turned the tide at the front. They argued, Fischer urging Araquistain to use his influence with Largo Caballero to be more ruthless. On 19 September, Araquistain secured for him a pass to go to Toledo. On the way, he passed cars rushing to
Madrid with wounded soldiers. Along the way, he counted five vehicles overturned in ditches and commented sourly: ‘Reckless driving does not win wars.’ He also witnessed a chaotic attack in which numerous militiamen died pointlessly. The lack of organization frustrated him intensely: ‘There is no political work, there are no mass meetings. One hears requests for newspapers. The militias lie around all day doing nothing. That conduces to flabbiness and lack of discipline.’
Disillusioned by what he had seen in Toledo, Fischer returned to Madrid. He read in
El Socialista,
the mouthpiece of Prieto’s moderate Socialists, an editorial calling for a rebirth of the initial revolutionary élan which had defeated the rebels in Madrid and so many cities on 18 July. Fischer reflected bitterly: ‘Yes, where is it, I wonder. Toledo, with its nonchalant militias and hundreds of visiting automobiles, gave the impression of a carnival rather than a war. Madrid has changed its clothes but not its mood. How can the élan be revived, asks
El Socialista
and answers: by telling the people the truth.’ Telling the truth, no matter how inconvenient, was to be the policy consistently adopted by Fischer in his articles. It would cause him problems with some Communist colleagues.
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On 20 September, Louis returned to Toledo, accompanied by Jan Yindrich, one of the Madrid correspondents of the United Press. He was surprised by the liberty afforded to correspondents: ‘After showing our passes at the archway through which one enters Toledo, nobody stops us or asks any questions. We are free to wander about, visit all advanced positions, talk to the troops, make sketches, etc. It is an informal war.’ He linked up with his friend, Luis Quintanilla, who had been sent by the Ministry of War to report on the progress of the siege. According to Fischer, Quintanilla ‘is volatile, gesticulates, effervesces’, and he got fully involved in the efforts to dislodge the besieged garrison, appearing before Fischer with singed eyelids. Like Fischer, he was frustrated by the ineffective actions of the militias, commenting with disgust: ‘Too much literature and photography. The men thought this was a picnic; they wanted their picture in the paper.’ On the way back to Madrid, Fischer stopped near Bargas, at the village of Olias del Rey. The biggest local landowners had been killed at the beginning of the war and their land collectivized. When Fischer asked some old
peasants if they could defend themselves, they replied that their young men were away fighting with the militias and that they knew only too well that, if the rebels won, many of them would be slaughtered, as had already happened to their relatives further south. One woman told him: ‘We peasants stand with the legitimate government because the alternative is death to some of us and the old degrading poverty to all of us.’
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Fischer’s curiosity was insatiable. Everything about Madrid fascinated him – the frenetic traffic, with cars being driven around at breakneck speed by militiamen leaning on their horns, the cafés crowded with people talking revolution, the prostitutes, the street vendors. He was intrigued by a sign on a fashionable shoe store which sported a Republican flag and the statement that ‘this house sympathizes with the regime. Long live the Republic.’ He commented: ‘What fears must have moved the owners to this avowal of faith!’ On 21 September, he went out for dinner with his friend Lester Ziffren. On the way to Marichu’s restaurant, they saw ‘a taxi dance spot still going strong’ and decided to go and explore: ‘Found young girls, not at all bad looking, hoofing it around at a nickel a dance. The place was called Shanghai and it bore a sign stating that it was “seized” by the CNT and UGT. Even a civil war couldn’t stop the dancing. A militiaman with a rifle sat near the door.’ Typically, Fischer started asking the waitresses questions and was delighted to find one who was a Socialist who had read Marx, and another, a Basque, who said that the Catholic Basques were fighting alongside the Socialists and Communists because their hatred for the Carlists and Fascists was greater than their disagreement with Marxism.
However, for all his curiosity about the changes in Madrid, Fischer could not keep away from Toledo despite what he had witnessed during the abortive siege of the Alcázar. Each day, he would plan to do something in the capital, and then either Jan Yindrich or Henry Buckley would ask him if he was going to Toledo and he could not resist: ‘I have apparently caught a disease which I have dubbed Alcazarosis.’ One day, he witnessed a visit from Largo Caballero which did little to enhance his opinion of the prime minister. After wearily watching an artillery piece fire at the Alcázar, he left and
did not say a single word to the men who crowded around his car. He did not even raise his fist in greeting. The assault guards had certainly expected some acknowledgement of their existence on his part. They were downcast when he sped away. I am told that he always has behaved in this way, all his life. Yet he is immensely popular. In this atmosphere of around-the-Alcázar depression, he might have broken a tradition to utter a sentence which would warm and enthuse.
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On 21 September, Fischer did not go to Toledo because he had a meeting with Marcel Rosenberg, the recently appointed Russian Ambassador. He commented innocently: ‘the appointment at this juncture has political significance. When Germany and Italy are withdrawing their embassies from Madrid, the Soviet Union registers its confidence in and friendship for the legitimate government by accrediting a special envoy to it.’ He had known Rosenberg in Moscow and Paris but now as Ambassador, while friendly, he was tight-lipped:
Rosenberg, as usual, listens but does not vouchsafe a milligram of information. I like him nevertheless as of old. His manner antagonises many people. He can be coldly cutting. But he can also be personal and cordial. In any case, I can learn much from him even when he says little. Besides, he is always wise, fathoms an idea after the first explanatory phrase, and reacts with his face or in a telling word.
After their first meeting, Fischer saw Rosenberg nearly every day until he was recalled to Moscow. Rosenberg introduced him to the dapper, English-speaking NKVD officer Colonel Alexander Orlov, and to the Military Attaché in the Russian Embassy, General Vladimir Gorev, who was the ‘Chief Rezident’ in Spain of Russian Military Intelligence – the GRU.
Fischer’s attitude to Soviet policy towards Spain suggested that he was far from having a particularly privileged position. His main source of information was
Pravda,
which he bought every morning. He thought it of enormous significance that, out of its total of six pages, the paper
often devoted a page or more, and never less than half a page, to letters from Soviet citizens who were contributing towards food relief for Spain. With an utter lack of cynicism, he commented in his diary:
It is obvious from the manner in which the
Pravda
features its readers’ correspondence that Moscow is fully aware of the political importance to it of the Spanish situation and will therefore not stint in helping Madrid to suppress the rebels. Moscow has warm, natural sympathies with an anti-Fascist government which includes two Communists and is presided over by Largo Caballero who told me six months ago ‘that there is no difference between himself and a Communist’.
Fischer realized only too well that Soviet policy was driven by national interests and he was especially acute in his analysis of the dangers that a Franco victory would mean for Russia. It was not just about the Germans coveting the Canary Islands or the Italians making themselves at home in Mallorca, but about the impact a fascist victory in Spain would have on internal politics within France. He perceived how Hitler aspired thereby to undermine the Soviet–French alliance and how the anti-Socialist prejudices of Britain’s ruling classes were blinding them to the danger posed to imperial interests.
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His relative ingenuousness in regard to Soviet policy contrasted with the sharpness revealed in his later published articles, the difference being that later he really did have the benefit of inside information.
Fischer wrote with approval of editorials in
El Socialista,
which pointed out that it was more important to win at the front than to seize automobiles and hotels in Madrid. Yet he complained about what he saw as absurd restrictions on the papers telling the truth about the Republic’s parlous position. Similarly, he was indignant about the lies being produced in newspapers in Europe to the effect that the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, had fled to Alicante. In the same vein, he was outraged when, on 25 September, Largo Caballero refused to authorize a proclamation informing the nation of the critical military situation, writing bitterly: ‘The masses ought to be stirred to enthusiasm or frightened into activity. Instead a dangerous optimism paralyzes
the policy of “Business as usual”. Madrid’s business proceeds as usual – except that its business is often not business but pleasure.’
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On the previous day, 24 September, Fischer had called on his friend Juan Negrín, who three weeks earlier had become Minister of Finance. Louis had been at Toledo the day before and returned covered in blood from wounded militiamen whom he had helped tend. The talk that night in his hotel – because of artillery attacks, he had moved to the Hotel Capitol on the other side of the Gran Vía from the Florida – had been bleak. Another guest, Mikhail Koltsov, had told him that he had tried to drive beyond Toledo and got a mere fourteen kilometres before seeing signs of advancing Nationalists. Accordingly, when he met Negrín, Fischer gave him a pessimistic assessment of the situation. Negrín agreed that things had been bad, but argued that there were already improvements thanks to the new government of Largo Caballero. He went as far as to say that he was more concerned with what would happen after what he regarded as the Republic’s inevitable victory. He described how he was organizing a crack force of frontier guards, the Carabineros, to protect the banks and tighten up border controls. Fischer’s ability to get politicians to talk to him without inhibitions saw Negrín confide both details of the Republic’s transfer of its gold reserves to the Soviet Union and his own doubts about the capacity of Largo Caballero. He argued that what was needed was ‘a steel leadership. Caballero could scarcely be talked to. He would not listen to criticism. He was much too sensitive.’ Fischer expressed his concerns about the press and the fact that the population was being fed lies about the real gravity of the situation.
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