Hitler appears to have been in a fine mood that evening: the aid to Spain would be dubbed Operation Magic Fire. (“Magic fire” music accompanies Siegfried’s passage through the flames to liberate Brünnhilde.) The Führer even sent twice as many Junkers Ju 52 transport planes as Franco requested. Franco would have eventually gotten his troops over the Spanish Republic’s naval blockade to the mainland, but Nazi assistance accelerated that movement, struck at the Republic’s morale, and buttressed Franco’s standing vis-à-vis Mola. Franco had also approached Italy for support, on July 22, 1936, and the new Italian foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law), was gung-ho. The duce had mocked the Spanish Republic as “not a revolution but a plagiarism,” and had been paying a small retainer to a leader of Spain’s fascist equivalents while vaguely promising support to any would-be putschists.32 Now, emboldened by reports of British acquiescence and French paralysis, he decided to provide substantial military assistance, without consulting his own military men. In parallel to his expansionism in Abyssinia, the duce dreamed of a still larger Italian Mediterranean empire at French expense, via a friendly government in Spain. He also derided Léon Blum as “one Jew who did not enjoy the gift of prophecy.”33 Spain would push Italy still closer to Germany.
Spain would also push France and the Soviet Union further apart. The French brass feared that any military support for the Spanish Popular Front could ignite a pan-European war, which, overestimating the German military, they felt France was in no position to fight successfully.34 More broadly, French ruling circles viewed reliance on the Soviets to stand up to Nazi Germany as a provocation toward Berlin and an invitation to ideological contagion. “If defeated,” the French foreign minister would note privately, France “would be Nazified. If victorious, it must, owing to the destruction of German power, submit, with the rest of Europe, to the overwhelming weight of the Slavic world, armed with the Communist flamethrower.”35
FABRICATING A “UNITED” CENTER
Yagoda’s NKVD was rounding up “Trotskyites,” including in faraway Gulag camps. On June 19, 1936—again, well before the putsch in Spain—he and Vyshinsky had sent Stalin a list of eighty-two people accused of terrorism “links,” recommending that they be tried by the military collegium and executed. Zinoviev and Kamenev were included. Stalin instructed Yezhov to have the NKVD prepare a trial against a united Trotskyite-Zinovievite “center.”36 On July 15, Yagoda sent a secret NKVD circular to every operative, severely criticizing the NKVD bosses in certain regions for “opportunistic kindheartedness, self-assurance, forgetfulness of old Chekist traditions, and inactivity” (i.e., failure to expose “Trotskyites”).37 Stalin was insisting on a high-profile public trial, broadcast live, and Yezhov applied pressure so that people under arrest began to be re-interrogated to build a story line of a “united center.” Zinoviev, naïvely, had been writing groveling prison letters to Stalin asking for forgiveness; Kamenev had been trying to dissociate himself from Zinoviev.38 In mid-July, the two were brought from prisons in the Urals to Moscow. Yezhov took part in their interrogations and appealed to their revolutionary patriotism, arguing that an international Trotskyite conspiracy in cahoots with Germany and Japan threatened the Soviet Union, and thus their confessions were necessary for the cause.
Zinoviev offered to comply if Stalin personally promised to spare him. Kamenev resisted (“You are observing Thermidor in pure form,” he said during interrogation). The two were taken to see “the politburo,” which turned out to be a meeting with Stalin and Voroshilov.39 Stalin evidently flattered them, calling them comrades, followers of Lenin, whose cooperation was necessary to combat Trotsky.40 No less germane was the fact that Kamenev had been informed that his son was under investigation. Kamenev and Zinoviev did begin to testify about their improbable plotting with Trotsky.41 On July 23, 1936, Yakov Agranov, who, together with Yezhov, had handled the original Kirov investigation case against the “Zinovievites,” personally re-interrogated the already imprisoned Dreitser (said to be the “head” of an underground “Trotskyite” organization) and Pikel, extracting the necessary “testimony” concerning a “united center.”42 On July 26, Stalin had the NKVD haul in Sokolnikov, who had once joined Zinoviev and Kamenev in questioning Stalin’s absolute power in the role of general secretary. On the night of July 27–28, the NKVD arrested the ex-wife of Yuri Pyatakov, Orjonikidze’s first deputy at heavy industry. Stalin’s anti-Trotsky drive had its own dynamic prior to events in Spain.
TRYING TO STEM REVOLUTION
Bereft of an ambassador in Madrid, Stalin had next to no information about what was going on, beyond reports via Comintern channels.43 On July 23, 1936, at a Comintern executive committee meeting, Dimitrov emphasized the value of the Spanish conflict for rallying international forces to a global popular front, and begged Stalin for comments on draft theses.44 Stalin wrote “correct” on Dimitrov’s instructions to the Spanish Communist party for restraint; on July 24, the secret orders went to Madrid for Spanish Communists “not to run ahead,” that is, to contain their struggle to supporting the “bourgeois democratic republic” rather than pushing for a dictatorship of the proletariat. Dimitrov did allow that “when our positions have strengthened, we can go further.”45 By July 25 the Nazis and Italian fascists were already wielding the bogeyman of “Bolshevism” in Spain to justify supporting the putschists. That day, with Blum backing off his pledge to support Spain’s Republic, the Spanish prime minister, in a letter to the Soviet envoy in Paris, conveyed his government’s desire to purchase Soviet arms in quantity.46 The Soviets did not reply. An Italian assessment out of Moscow on July 27 noted Soviet “embarrassment” over Spain and a likely pursuit of “prudent neutrality.”47
Dimitrov was not received by Stalin during these days. Litvinov, who had recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday and received the Order of Lenin, was urging Stalin to maintain Soviet-French-Anglo “solidarity” by avoiding military aid to Spain’s besieged Republic. The foreign affairs commissar finally got in to see the dictator on July 28 (Molotov and Voroshilov were absent). (Not until August 7 would Stalin again summon anyone to the Kremlin office.)48 The antifascist popular front strategy (Dimitrov) and “collective security” (Litvinov), once seen as in sync, were deeply at odds, given France’s position.