Most damaging of all the private reports on the maneuvers was Voroshilov’s. At the banquet, in front of foreigners, he lauded the exercises. But while Tukhachevsky, acknowledging the shortcomings of tank performance in the rifle divisions, whose commanders still did not know how to use them to the fullest, deemed their efforts superior to what the Red Army had previously managed, Voroshilov internally denounced the tank formations and urged a doubling down on infantry.170 Part of his motivation appears to have been long-standing envy at the superior abilities and reputations of Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and Uborevičius (commander of the Ukrainian military district), all modernizers, and more knowledgeable about Germany.171
OPERATION X
On September 13, 1936, the city of San Sebastián fell to Spain’s putschists. The next day, Molotov, having just returned from holiday, followed up on Stalin’s telegram to Kaganovich the week before and chaired a meeting devoted to, among other matters, Spain. Attendees included Yagoda, Slutsky (NKVD foreign intelligence), Uritsky (military intelligence), Meyer Trilisser (Comintern intelligence), and Dimitrov, who recorded an agenda item as “organization of aid to the Spanish (via a smuggling scheme).”172 Later that day at Lubyanka, Yagoda presided over a meeting with Slutsky, Uritsky, Mikhail Frinovsky (head of NKVD border guards), and others to plan foreign military deliveries, including purchases abroad, for Spain. Before September 14 was out, Slutsky and Uritsky had presented Kaganovich with corrections to an operational plan, code-named Operation X.173
Also on September 14, the annual Nazi Nuremberg party rally concluded as Hitler announced further rearmament steps and unleashed his most rabid denunciation yet of the international Jewish conspiracy and the “infernal plague” of Bolshevism, which was “letting loose these wild beasts on the terrified and helpless world.” He mentioned German designs on Ukraine. In response to this drumbeat, the Soviet state publishing house issued a collection of translated original German documents from the period of the Great War, The Crash of the German Occupation in Ukraine, underscoring the high costs then of Germany’s attempted colonial enslavement of Ukraine and warning, “Let German fascists now try to poke their snouts onto Soviet land!”174 The Führer still hoped to catalyze a broad anti-Bolshevik coalition, which would support, or at least not block, German expansionism eastward and continental domination. He portrayed the Soviet Union as intent on imminent attack, but his ravings made it seem as if Germany would march then and there.175 The U.S. ambassador in Berlin thought the rally speeches might “make it difficult for the Soviet embassy to remain in Berlin.”176 Hitler mused that Stalin would be moved to break off diplomatic relations.177 Litvinov urged a Soviet diplomatic protest to deter further invective.178 Stalin, on the contrary, was soon renewing feelers to the Nazi regime.
Voroshilov sent detailed lists of all materials to be supplied in the Spanish operation to Stalin for approval.179 Because of the Non-Intervention Agreement, the Soviets had initially aimed to provide only third-party and “surplus” weapons, but, given the urgency, Operation X specified also providing Soviet weapons—just as the Spanish government had been requesting. Soviet intelligence was estimating that the Republic possessed one rifle for every three soldiers.180 On September 18, the first small-arms shipment, labeled CANNED MEAT, left a Soviet port. So did humanitarian cargo (flour, sugar, butter, canned goods, clothing, medicine).181 Secret Soviet documents stipulated that for the weapons “the customer should pay their full price.” Back on September 13, the Spanish Republic had secretly decided to evacuate the better part of the country’s gold reserves from Madrid by train. Spain had the world’s fourth-largest reserves, amounting to more than 2.3 trillion pesetas, or $783 million at prevailing exchange rates, a cache amassed by the crown over centuries: bullion bars, gold louis d’or, British sovereigns, rare Portuguese coins, Inca and Aztec treasure from the conquistador period. The crates began arriving at the port of Cartagena in the early hours of September 17, and for the next five and a half weeks remained in a hillside cave above the harbor. Prime Minister Largo Caballero had shipped the gold to the port at which Spain had agreed to receive Soviet cargo.
NKVD COUP
In Moscow, comic relief arrived on September 19, 1936, when regional party boss Kuzma Ryndin, after whom twenty collective farms and mines had been named, petitioned the dictator to rename Chelyabinsk—which roughly connoted “a pit”—into “Kaganovichgrad.” Stalin wrote on the request: “Against.”182 The next day, the politburo formally rejected a proposal from Litvinov for an expanded Soviet-led bloc against Nazi Germany, but it reaffirmed the pursuit of “collective security.”183 Franco was busy establishing a regime. On the battlefield he took his time, transferring operations from urgent military objectives to political ones, perplexing the other generals. On September 21, in a hut on an airfield in Salamanca, citing the need for unified command in the war effort, Franco managed to get himself elevated to generalissimo of insurgent armies, even though he was junior to Mola. A week later, Franco manipulated matters further to get himself named chief of state with “absolute powers.” Several of the colluding commanders envisioned his elevation as temporary, anticipating a return of the monarchy, but Franco remarked of the moment, “You have placed Spain in my hands.” He did not even control Madrid.
Throughout Europe, significant doubts reverberated among leftist intellectuals about the alleged treason of the executed Bolshevik revolutionaries, but in Republic Spain, the POUM’s La Batalla was almost the only newspaper to detail, let alone condemn, the Moscow showcase trial, labeling the Soviet Union a “bureaucratic regime of poisonous dictatorship.” Tit for tat, the lead editorial in the September 1936 issue of The Communist International, issued in multiple European languages, condemned the POUM as fascist agents masquerading as leftists, with ties to Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler.184
Yezhov was bombarding Stalin with reports of secret police deficiencies and forwarded a denunciation of Yagoda by a provincial NKVD chief.185 Stalin summoned Yezhov to the Black Sea.186 Yagoda evidently knew, eavesdropping on Stalin’s calls to Yezhov in Moscow.187 Yefim Yevdokimov, whose bailiwick included Sochi, was also likely pouring poison into Stalin’s ear about the detested Yagoda.188 Suddenly, on the evening of September 25, 1936, Stalin sent a bombshell phonegram from Sochi to Kaganovich and Molotov, in Moscow, urging Yagoda’s removal. The message was cosigned by Andrei Zhdanov, the dictator’s new favorite, ten years younger than Kirov (and eighteen younger than Stalin), who was with him at the dacha. “Yagoda clearly turned out to be not up to the task of unmasking the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc,” the secret message read. “The OGPU was four years late in this process.”189 “Four years” harked back to the meetings among a few party opposition members damning Stalin’s rule, as a result of the catastrophe of collectivization and famine. Among the potential candidates to head the NKVD were the experienced Chekists Yevdokimov and Balytsky, who at one time had risen to number three in the secret police, before Yagoda squeezed him out of Moscow and sent him back to Ukraine. Yet another option was Lavrenti Beria, the (nominally) former Chekist running the South Caucasus party machine.190 But Stalin picked his party-apparatus protégé Yezhov.