Would Stalin risk getting embroiled in foreign war? “A number of Soviet officials charged with the conduct of Soviet foreign relations were opposed to sending funds to Spain, since they felt that such action would be used by Italy and Germany to justify the aid given by themselves,” one Soviet official told the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Moscow on August 3, 1936. “These objections were overruled, however, by the Soviet leaders who take the view that if the Soviet Union is to continue to maintain hegemony over the international revolutionary movement, it must not hesitate in periods of crisis to assume the leadership of that movement.”81 Tellingly, however, neither Stalin nor any of the members of the Soviet leadership attended the August 3 Moscow demonstration. Not even Comintern leaders were allowed to appear. The main speech was delivered by the head of the trade unions (Nikolai Shvernik), as if the process of gathering humanitarian aid were a spontaneous expression of worker solidarity.82
All the while, the geopolitical maneuvering was fast and furious. In early August, France approached Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and other countries about a formal collective “Non-Intervention Agreement” for Spain.83 Britain had treated a formal agreement guardedly, but now it decided it could drive a wedge between France and Spain. On August 3, the Italian government promised to study the matter. On August 5, the French chargé d’affaires in Moscow approached the foreign affairs commissariat, reporting that Britain had signed on and that Germany had agreed to do so if the Soviets would. Litvinov was on holiday, and one of his deputies, Krestinsky, advised Stalin, “We cannot either not give an affirmative response or give an evasive response, because then this will be used by the Germans and Italians, who will justify their further support for the insurgents by our refusal.” That evening, Krestinsky was able to reply that the USSR, too, would sign on, provided that not only Italy and Germany but Portugal’s dictatorship did so as well.84 The next day, Italy confirmed its support in principle.
Also on August 5, Trotsky, from Norway, sent his French and American publishers a manuscript that he had completed with only a little more than half a year’s work: The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? He sent a copy to his son Sedov in Paris for excerpting in the Bulletin. Thus did Soviet intelligence obtain a copy, while reporting that the text was to be translated into multiple foreign languages, which meant worldwide impact.85 When Stalin saw the text remains uncertain, but it was likely not long after it had come into NKVD hands.86 There is no known record of his reaction. Still, Trotsky’s spirited wielding of Marxist analysis against the purported leader of world Marxists struck at the foundations of Stalin’s legitimacy and self-identity. He portrayed Stalin’s rule as a full-blown counterrevolution, or Thermidor, a consequence of an evil social compact between the new bureaucratic elite and the old bourgeoisie, a deformation of Leninism pejoratively labeled “Stalinism.” Notwithstanding the building of socialism, therefore, the revolution had been betrayed.87 Trotsky’s analysis appeared with impeccable timing: Spain could be taken as proof of Stalin’s betrayal of the entire world revolution. The book reinforced the convergence of the Trotsky problem and the Spanish problem.
FARCE
Preparations proceeded for a public trial in Moscow of “Trotskyites.” On August 7, 1936, USSR procurator general Vyshinsky sent Stalin a draft indictment charging twelve people with establishing a terror organization aiming to assassinate the dictator and other members of the leadership. Stalin raised the number of defendants to sixteen, five of whom were Germans—members of the German Communist party who had fled to the USSR—thereby reinforcing his beloved foreign espionage story line. He also sharpened the “testimony” he received of the fabricated plot. “It is not enough to cut down the oak,” he inserted in the testimony of one alleged would-be assassin. “You must cut down all the young that grow around the oak.”88
The French Communist party had sent a reconnaissance delegation to Spain and, also on August 7, reported that “the situation is very critical because of non-availability of armaments,” a conclusion confirmed by Soviet military intelligence. Comintern HQ in Moscow telegrammed Maurice Thorez, head of the French Communists, to pressure the French government to rescue the Spanish Republic and thereby the French Popular Front (and, perhaps, the USSR from having to intervene in Spain).89 That same day, Krestinsky explained in a telegram to the Soviet envoy in Rome that “we understood Italy and Germany would continue arming the putschists” in Spain, but the USSR had to remove any justification for them to do so.90 On August 10, the expression “malevolent neutrality,” coined by Labour peer Lord Strabolgi in reference to British policy on Spain, appeared in the Daily Herald, the world’s bestselling newspaper.
Stalin had little desire to follow in Britain’s ignominious wake while being shown up by Mussolini and Hitler, cold-shouldered by the French Socialist Léon Blum, and squeezed between a whining Litvinov and a lacerating Trotsky. But if he rejected the Non-Intervention Agreement, Britain and France might unite with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany against the USSR in a four-power deal over Spain, and perhaps more broadly. (The British cabinet secretary had privately stated on July 20, 1936, “In the present state of Europe, with France and Spain menaced by Bolshevism, it is not inconceivable that before long it might pay us to throw in our lot with Germany and Italy.”)91 There was also, as ever, the commercial aspect. On August 19, Litvinov would write to the Soviet envoy Surits that Kandelaki, the Soviet trade representative in Berlin, would “inform the Germans about our demurral on the [credit] agreement so far. At the same time, he was authorized to ask if the Germans were agreed to selling us certain items that specially interest us and, if so, raise the question of a credit agreement anew.”92
Nazi Germany, as Berlin’s authoritative Institute for Business Cycle Research had recently noted in a report, faced depleted stocks of raw materials, which would seem to have argued for rapprochement with both the USSR and the Western powers.93 But the Führer had other ideas, finalizing a Four-Year Plan in August 1936—one of the very few documents in Hitler’s own hand—which began with a statement about history being a struggle among nations for existence. It insisted that Germany had to be ready for war within four years; otherwise, “those strata of mankind which have hitherto provided the leadership” would suffer “replacement by worldwide Jewry.” Hitler added that “a victory of Bolshevism over Germany would lead . . . to the final destruction, indeed to the annihilation of the German people. . . . In the face of the necessity of defense against this danger, all other considerations must recede into the background as being completely irrelevant.”94 Soviet intelligence had obtained information that Germany would not be ready to launch a massive-scale war before 1939.95 Still, as Hitler revealed in his Four-Year Plan, Germany’s destiny would be realized through conquest, not trade.96