Now Stalin also approved the dispatch not just of propagandists and diplomats but military advisers.149 The commander of a Soviet naval cruiser, Nikolai Kuznetsov, who was at sea, received a telegram summons to Moscow and, at the defense commissariat, discovered that he was being posted to Spain as naval attaché. (“What do you know about Spain?” he was asked.)150 The top military adviser appointed to Spain was the Latvian Berzin, who had headed Soviet military intelligence until 1935. The Soviet military attaché to the Madrid front was Vladimir Gorev (b. 1900), a blond Belorussian peasant who had become a veteran undercover military intelligence operative with experience in China and the United States, spoke excellent English, and had exemplary manners.151 The position of commercial attaché was soon filled by Artur Stashevsky [Hirschfeld], a Jew born in tsarist Latvia, who had been a driving force in the accumulation of Soviet gold reserves and who, in Spain, would serve as the top Soviet political operative.152 Already by early fall, there would be more than 550 Soviet personnel in-country, the highest ranking of whom took up residence in Madrid’s Palace Hotel.153
Additionally, the NKVD sent Leiba Feldbein, who used the name Alexander Orlov, to gather intelligence and organize guerrilla warfare in Spain.154 Orlov had been born (1895) in Belorussia and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, joining Trotsky’s group of leftist internationalists in 1917, fighting for the Reds in the Russian civil war, and in 1920, at age twenty-five, joining the party and the Cheka in Arkhangelsk, going on to work in the economic and transport sections of the secret police and undercover in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Copenhagen, and London. “He spoke English well, dressed dapperly, was good-looking and very intelligent,” Louis Fischer would write.155 Abram Slutsky, head of NKVD foreign intelligence, had evidently alighted upon his friend Orlov for posting to Spain partly to protect him: a young assistant in the NKVD with whom Orlov had been having an affair shot herself in front of Lubyanka HQ after he refused to leave his wife.156 Orlov, his wife, and their daughter would cross the Soviet-Polish border en route to Spain on September 10, 1936.157
Ilya Ehrenburg, the Izvestiya correspondent, who arrived in Spain a few weeks after his rival Pravda correspondent Koltsov, wrote in a letter to Stalin (also on September 10), after having traveled more than 1,500 miles of Spanish territory, that “POUM (the Trotskyites) in Catalonia are weak. At the front, their column of 3,500 men is the most undisciplined. They have tense relations with the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (our party) and with the anarchists.”158 Stalin held the opposite view on the POUM’s threat.
DIFFERENT SHOWS
In London on September 9, 1936, the Non-Intervention Committee held its first meeting, with twenty-seven European states represented. The session devolved into insults. Especially acrimonious exchanges took place between the Soviet ambassador (Ivan Maisky) and the German embassy counselor (Prince Otto von Bismarck, grandson of the chancellor).159 But the deeper problem was the conveners’ cynicism. “A piece of humbug,” one senior British foreign office official observed of the committee. “Where humbug is the alternative to war, it is impossible to place too high a value upon it.”160 But given that the public heard every day about how Italy and Germany were intervening forcefully, British credibility suffered a blow.
Contemporaneously with the sorry spectacle in London, military attachés and specialists from France and Czechoslovakia, as well as Britain, had been invited to Red Army maneuvers (September 7–10)—a show to impress. This was the first time a British delegation had been invited. Held in the Belorussian military district, commanded by the capable Iona Yakir, the Bessarabian-born (1896) son of a Jewish pharmacist, the exercises assumed a German-Polish aggression against the Soviet Union.161 All told, an astonishing 85,000 troops and auxiliaries and 1,136 tanks and armored vehicles took part. The “enemy” (blues) attacked with almost 37,000 men, 211 airplanes, and 453 combined-arms tanks, mostly T-28s but also T-27s (the Soviet variant of the Carden Loyd tankette), while the “friendly” forces (reds) possessed more than 42,000 men and 240 airplanes, as well as three mechanized brigades and several rifle and cavalry-tank units. The terrain was circumscribed in relation to the size of forces engaged and, without rivers or marshes, artificially ideal for tank warfare. After aviation created a smoke fog, the large mechanized units forged the Berezina River. One mechanized tank brigade completed a 125-mile march. The culmination entailed a parachute drop and reassembly, in battle formation, of some 1,800 men armed with machine guns and light artillery.162 The scale, complexity, and coordination of the exercises, according to Pravda (September 10), duly impressed the onlookers. In fact, Britain’s Lieutenant Colonel Giffard Martel, a well-known tank theorist at the war office, was put in mind of the tsarist army: great physical brutality with manifest “tactical clumsiness.” Privately dismissing the exercise as “more like a tattoo than maneuvers,” he deemed the training of junior officers weak, found radio communication not widely used, and saw little skill in the use of mechanized formations. Martel surmised that a well-equipped and well-commanded enemy could dodge the blow and inflict tremendous counterdamage.163
General Victor-Henri Schweisguth, who led the French delegation, told Voroshilov that Hitler saw the Soviet Union as the source of evil and was menacingly accusing Czechoslovakia of complicity in that evil. Voroshilov retorted that Hitler’s anti-Soviet ravings masked his real intention of attacking France, and once again urged bilateral staff talks.164 Schweisguth made a mental note that his Soviet counterparts claimed to want closer military cooperation with France yet seemed eager for Hitler to attack France first. In his confidential report upon return to Paris, he deemed the Red Army “insufficiently prepared for a war against a Great European Power,” adding: “The circumstances of its employment against Germany remain very problematical.” He warned that the Soviets hoped that “the storm burst first upon France,” and that, because of the absence of a common frontier with Germany, the Soviet Union could stand aside, like the United States in 1918, “to arbitrate the situation in the face of a Europe exhausted by battle.”165 Schweisguth saw value in talks with the Soviets only as prevention against a Soviet-German military alliance.166 The feelings were mutuaclass="underline" Yakir, who had just traveled to France, came back with a low regard for French military doctrine, technical level, operational-strategic thinking, and its army as a whole.167
Captain František Moravec, of Czechoslovak military intelligence, had arrived in Moscow before the maneuvers to cooperate with his Soviet counterparts in connection with their alliance treaty. Quartered at the Metropole and enveloped by Soviet counterintelligence, his six-man Czechoslovak team was received by Uritsky, head of military intelligence, becoming the first group of foreigners admitted to the “Chocolate House,” the three-story mansion that served as HQ, and then by Tukhachevsky, chief of the general staff. There were banquets at Spiridonovka on gold plates with the tsar’s monogram, stay-overs at the former Yusupov Palace in Arkhangelskoe, and a visit to the Moscow–Volga Canal Gulag site. He perceived his Soviet partners as ignorant of the Wehrmacht, noting that Soviet military intelligence “had not even organized proper supporting activities, such as the study of the German news media.” Whether Moravec, who spoke Russian, was shown the breadth of Soviet capabilities remains uncertain (the Czechoslovaks were technically “White Guards”). Still, he was correct about the dearth of foreign-language expertise in a system that valued proletarian origins and sycophancy over expertise. “The unexpected inefficiency in the military intelligence service of a regime which had been nourished on clandestine undertakings,” he concluded, “was surprising.”168 The men from Prague felt an urgency vis-à-vis their neighbor Nazi Germany that was not felt in Moscow.169