In an open letter to Largo Caballero (also October 15) published in Soviet and Spanish newspapers, Stalin boasted of Soviet aid that “the workers of the USSR are doing no more than their duty in giving the help they are able to give to the Spanish revolutionary masses.”213 But he paid close attention to the economic costs. The Soviets had recently been informed about the Spanish gold. The Republic’s finance minister, Juan Negrín, negotiated with Ambassador Rosenberg to hand off a large part of the gold reserves stashed in Cartagena for current and future payments. Rosenberg reported (October 15) that the matter had been agreed upon in principle.214 In strictest secrecy, with Negrín on-site, the NKVD’s English-speaking Orlov, posing as a representative of the U.S. Federal Reserve, oversaw the transfer from the caves, evidently enlisting the Soviet tankists who had arrived a few days earlier. On October 25, the same day Stalin was back in Moscow, they loaded 510 metric tons—around 7,800 crates, each weighing 145 pounds—collectively valued at $518 million, onto four ships bound for Odessa.215
Litvinov, for his part, lamented to Rosenberg that “the Spanish question has ruined our relations with England and France and sowed doubts in Bucharest and even Prague.”216 But Stalin would not be cowed: on October 23, the Soviet Union—without relinquishing membership in the Non-Intervention Committee—announced that because of others’ violations, it was not bound by the Non-Intervention Agreement.217 The French were incredulous. “Stalin has no ideals,” complained the secretary general of the French foreign ministry to the British.218 For Stalin, of course, everything was the other way around: the inactions of France and Britain, in the face of blatant Italian fascist and Nazi German violations, had soured him on the Western powers.219
That October of 1936, the German ambassador, Schulenburg, returned from summer leave—and encountered extraordinary warmth, from the Soviet border to the capital, “as if nothing whatsoever had happened.” He informed Berlin that Krestinsky was “extremely friendly and did not refer to events at Nuremberg at all.”220 Stalin’s shopping list for Germany included armored plating, aircraft catapults, underwater listening devices, and warships (costing 200 million reichsmarks), for which the Soviets were offering to pay largely in manganese and chromium ores on the basis of world prices, according to a German memo (October 19).221 On October 20, Hitler bestowed plenipotentiary powers on Hermann Göring to implement the Four-Year Plan by prioritizing weapons production, tightening state controls on exports, and achieving self-sufficiency in essential raw materials, all to reduce imports (costing scarce hard currency) and the impact of a possible blockade. Soviet trade officials were hopeful, as Göring appeared poised to assume a direct role in bilateral trade.222
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SERGO
Orjonikidze’s poor health was deteriorating further, and his autumn rest away from Moscow was proving relentlessly stressful, thanks to Stalin. Whereas a mere 11 of the 823 highest officials of the heavy industry commissariat who belonged to the nomenklatura (those officials who could not be removed without Central Committtee approval) had been fired during the party card verification campaign of spring–summer 1936—with just 9 of them suffering arrest—during the last four months of 1936, 44 senior officials would be fired, 37 of whom would lose their party cards and, with three exceptions, be arrested.223 In October 1936, Stalin had Orjonikidze’s elder brother Papuliya arrested, a first for a relative of a sitting politburo member. Orjonikidze demanded to see his brother, but Lavrenti Beria, the policeman turned party boss in Georgia, where Papuliya worked, said he could allow that only after concluding the investigation.224 Orjonikidze understood that it was not Beria but Stalin who was behind the incarceration.225 On October 8, Stalin had Kaganovich’s deputy Yakov Livshits removed as deputy commissar of railways and, six days later, arrested.226
On October 24, the country effusively celebrated “Comrade Sergo’s” fiftieth birthday in a Union-wide extravaganza. But the industry commissar did not attend the gala, staged near his holiday dacha in Kislovodsk. (His wife went on his behalf.)227 Stalin ordered the arrests of Orjonikidze’s former Caucasus associates Stepan Vardanyan, now party boss in Taganrog and the former leader of reconquered Bolshevik Georgia, and Levan Gogoberidze, party secretary at a factory in the Azov–Black Sea territory and a former party boss of Georgia.228 Happy birthday, Sergo.
How far Stalin would go remained to be seen. On October 25—after two and a half months away—he returned to Moscow to discover an inquiry from the Associated Press in Moscow about rumors that he was ill or perhaps dead. Normally very touchy about discussions of his health, that very day he responded playfully. “As far as I know from the foreign press, I long ago left this sinful world and moved on to the next,” Stalin wrote to the correspondent. “As it is impossible not to trust the foreign press, if one does not want to be crossed out of the list of civilized people, I ask you to believe this report and not to disturb my peace in the silence of that other world.” The delighted AP man dispatched a telegram to the United States on October 26, to the effect that “Stalin refused to deny the rumors of his death.”229
The bulk of Spain’s gold, reaching Odessa by November 2, went by train to Moscow, accompanied by Orlov’s cousin, Ukraine NKVD operative Zinovy Katznelson. Another $155 million (some 2,000 crates) was shipped to Marseilles, as an advance for weapons the Spaniards hoped to purchase from France. A small remainder was taken to a cave in southern Spain. Some of the lot that arrived in the USSR was evidently deposited in the finance commissariat’s precious metal vaults on Nastasinsky Lane on November 6, 1936, in time for Revolution Day.230 Orlov, having accompanied the shipment to Soviet shores, was back in Spain already and, on November 7, celebrated the Bolshevik anniversary in the company of, among others, Koltsov and Gorev, in the latter’s suite at Madrid’s Palace Hotel.231 In parallel, Trotsky had ordered his son in Paris to transfer his archives to the International Institute of Social History, on Rue Michelet in Amsterdam, headed by the Menshevik émigré Boris Nicolaevsky, but Zborowski tipped off the Soviets, and a few days later, on the night of November 6–7, the papers were stolen (cash was left untouched)—another Revolution Day gift for Stalin.
On November 6, Stalin took in the customary Revolution Day performance at the Bolshoi in the imperial box, and the next day he presided over the parade atop the Mausoleum. Bukharin, with his lover, the twenty-three-year-old Anna Larina, was living in Stalin’s old Kremlin apartment, where Nadya had killed herself. He possessed a gun—given to him by Voroshilov, with the ironic inscription TO THE LEADER OF THE GREAT PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION—but did not attempt suicide. He was still listed on the masthead of Izvestiya as editor, so he received a pass to the Revolution Day celebration, in his case for the lowest level of the reviewing stand. Stalin caught sight of him and sent a guard to invite him and Larina up to the Mausoleum, a gesture for all to see—and misread as reconciliation. Not long thereafter, another story has it, Bukharin was being served with an eviction notice for the Kremlin apartment when, suddenly, the apartment’s special Kremlin line rang: it was Stalin, just inquiring how things were going. Bukharin informed him of the eviction, and Stalin appeared to react angrily; the eviction was halted. Stalin was torturing him psychologically.232