Spain had been Europe’s only major country to avoid the Great War, and the Second Spanish Republic, born in April 1931, bucked the authoritarian trend engulfing the continent. That year, amid a resounding Radical Republican Party victory in municipal elections, King Alfonso XIII, who had reigned since his birth, in 1886, fled abroad (without formal abdication), inspiring hopes among the country’s peasants and workers and fears among the propertied and the Church establishment. But the Republic had managed only timid land reform, while Spain’s few pockets of industry remained gripped by the Depression. A third of the population could neither read nor write, and more than half of its children had no access to education. The Cortes, Spain’s parliament, was roiled by raw, irreconcilable emotions—for and against the Church and the army, for and against socialism. A military coup in August 1932 had been foiled by a general strike, but it confirmed the army’s lack of loyalty to the Republic. Spain experienced wild electoral swings from left (1931) to right (1933) and back on February 18, 1936, when a leftist coalition known as the Popular Front defeated the ruling coalition of rightist parties (the National Front). A quirk in the election law magnified the Popular Front’s narrow victory and gave them a solid majority of 264 representatives—162 Left Republicans and independents, 88 Socialists, 14 Communists—versus 156 for the right and 54 for the center (including many Catalans and the Basques).2 The Popular Front’s majority, moreover, stemmed from working-class parties, but the Socialists, Communists, and anarchists did not take government portfolios. At the same time, the Basques in the north and the Catalans in the northeast strove for autonomy, while the central government possessed no reliable provincial officialdom and was hard pressed to live up to soaring expectations for social reform. Some electoral fraud on behalf of the Popular Front also contributed to the instability. More vivid were sensational fables of “Red massacres” of clergy and landowners, mob actions, and rural unrest. The upshot was a cauldron of antigovernment conspiracies.3
Spain would be torn apart by a civil war during which the country of 25 million people would see 1.7 million fighters conscripted by the Republic and 1.2 million by the Nationalists, and up to 200,000 battlefield deaths, over the course of nearly three years of combat over class, religion, region, and governance. Perhaps as many as 49,000 civilians would perish in the Republic’s zone, where the leftists would perpetrate or indulge mob killings of “reactionaries” and “fascists.” How many civilians died in the Nationalists’ bombing of Republic-controlled cities remains unknown (perhaps 10,000), but the Nationalists would end up summarily executing some 130,000 people in a deliberate strategy of anticivilian terror.4 During the same period, Stalin would execute or cause the death of up to 1 million people, from a total population of close to 170 million. But the conspiracies in the Soviet Union were invented.
Some scholars have argued that events in Spain helped precipitate or at least radicalize Stalin’s domestic terror of 1936–38, which they portray as a sincere, if wildly excessive, attempt to eradicate suspected real and potential saboteurs lying in wait to assist externally launched aggression.5 But Stalin had decided in 1935 to reopen the Kirov murder case and instigate a new wave of arrests of “Trotskyites” around the country. On June 29, 1936—before any hint of Spain—Yagoda had reported to Stalin, Molotov, and Yezhov on “very important” interrogation testimony obtained from arrested “Trotskyites”: Yefim Dreitser, Trotsky’s former bodyguard; Richard Pikel, former head of Zinoviev’s secretariat; and Isaac Esterman. Stalin circulated the report to the politburo.6 Furious preparations were under way for a showcase trial (pokazatelnyi protess) involving these and other “Trotskyites” in Moscow. Spain would turn out to be important for Stalin’s mass bloodletting less as cause than as added rationalization.7
In the summer and early fall of 1936, the Soviet leader made no speeches; indeed, he did not even appear in public. He sat on his Sochi veranda, reading stacks of well-ordered secret documents, then dictated some telegrams to aides with him on the Black Sea coast, which technicians coded and relayed to Kaganovich in Moscow. Kaganovich, who had never finished elementary school and could not write grammatical Russian, in turn formulated Stalin’s instructions as politburo decrees, which he had coded and dispatched to the tens of thousands of party committees that existed in every single Soviet locality and factory, and a majority of collective and state farms. Comintern secretary general Dimitrov did the same for every Communist party in the world. This produced orchestrated mass meetings all across Eurasia and beyond, at which preselected speakers issued demands for execution, even before convictions had been pronounced, while others in attendance raised their hands in agreement. The Soviet press, in ideological lockstep, delivered saturation coverage to thousands of towns and tens of thousands of villages, whipping up intense hysteria. The power of Stalin’s regime—resting upon the telegraph, a tiny handful of aides, the Communist party machine, the secret police, the military, and the dream of a better world—was breathtaking.
While atop his bluff overlooking the Black Sea, 850 miles from Moscow, Stalin would also decide after much hesitation to intervene in the Spanish civil war.8 He ordered no strategic analyses of the pros and cons or formal policy-making discussions.9 He seems to have consulted next to no one. Molotov, head of the government, was himself on holiday (July 27–September 1, 1936). Mikoyan was in the United States (August–September) to study the food industry, with more than $600,000 in hard currency to acquire model machinery.10 When the intervention details were finalized, Orjonikidze, head of heavy industry, was on holiday (September 5–November 5).11 To be sure, Kaganovich was in Moscow, and in frequent contact with Sochi (referring to Stalin as “our parent”). Voroshilov was also in the capital and communicated with Stalin on the high-frequency phone and by ciphered telegram. But the decision to take action in Spain, like the earlier reopening of the Kirov case and preparations for a grand trial of Trotskyites, was Stalin’s alone. We shall puzzle it out, including limits he imposed.12 Soviet military hardware sent to Spain would be voluminous and state of the art, but Soviet personnel would never exceed 700 or so at any time, two thirds of them in lower-level positions: pilots, tank drivers, technicians. It was not Spain but Trotsky that riveted Stalin’s attention, including much of the attention he paid to Spain.
Never an optimist about revolution abroad, Stalin had nonetheless said that the critical ingredient was war, which Spain would have, making it a test of his own theory of geopolitics. The question of revolution in Spain also intensified his rivalry with his long-standing nemesis. Not long after King Alfonso’s flight, Trotsky had written an unsolicited letter (April 27, 1931) to the Soviet politburo advising that the fate of “the revolution” in Spain depended on whether a combat-capable and authoritative Communist party was formed there. He had also warned that worker-peasant defeat “would lead almost automatically to the establishment in Spain of a genuine fascism in the style of Mussolini.” Stalin had distributed the letter to the inner circle, writing on it, “I think this impudent and Menshevik charlatan citizen Trotsky should get a blow to the head from the Comintern executive committee. Let him know his place.”13
COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Britain had acceded to French ambitions in Morocco in 1904, provided that weaker Spain retained control over the Moroccan territory directly opposite British-controlled Gibraltar, which was crucial to Britain’s dominant position in the Mediterranean. Francisco Franco y Bahamonde had arrived in Spanish Morocco in 1912 and cofounded a Spanish Legion there. (His counterpart, the French commander in North Africa, was Philippe Pétain.) A provincial like Stalin and Hitler, Franco had grown up in Spanish Galicia, where he was marinated in peasant pragmatism and bullied by his father. He was short in stature at five feet five inches (1.64 meters)—two inches shorter than Stalin and three than Hitler—and very slight, earning the nickname Cerillito (“Little Matchstick”). At age fourteen, unable to enroll at the Naval Academy, Franco had entered an infantry academy, where, in 1910, he graduated 251st in a class of 312. In quick succession, however, he would become Spain’s youngest captain, major, colonel, and general (the first in his graduating class), thanks to his exploits in colonial Morocco. In 1916, Franco took a bullet to the lower abdomen—a fraction of an inch in any direction and, like most soldiers with stomach wounds in Africa, he would have died. But after ten years of ruthless counterinsurgency, he secured the Moroccan ruler’s surrender, the deed that earned him a general’s rank at thirty-three, which made him the youngest general ever in the Spanish army and at the time the youngest in Europe. “My years in Africa live within me with indescribable force,” he would later tell a newspaper editor. “There was born the possibility of rescuing a Great Spain.”14