Stalin, to a considerable extent, held the fate of China and, indeed, Asia in his hands.
CHINA IN THE BALANCE
Dimitrov, on December 14, 1936, held a meeting of Comintern hierarchs, after which he wrote to Stalin that the Chinese Communists had become close to Zhang, despite Comintern warnings about his unreliability, and that “it was hard to imagine Zhang Xueliang would have undertaken his adventurist action without coordination with them.”302 Around midnight, Stalin phoned him: “Are these events in China occurring with your authorization? This is the greatest service to Japan anyone could possibly render. Who is this Wang Ming of yours? A provocateur? He wanted to file a telegram to have Chiang Kai-shek killed.” (Wang Ming, born Chen Shaoyu in 1904, headed the Chinese Comintern delegation in Moscow.) When Dimitrov claimed innocence, Stalin stated, “I’ll find you that telegram.”303 (There was likely no such telegram: Stalin was misinformed or trying to scare Dimitrov into pulling back.) Later still, Molotov phoned the Comintern head: “Come to Comrade Stalin’s office tomorrow at 3:30; we’ll discuss Ch[inese] affairs. Only you and Man[uilsky], nobody else!”304 Pravda (December 14) and Izvestiya (December 15) condemned Chiang’s kidnapping as playing into Japanese hands.
The Comintern officials were received on December 16, at 7:20 p.m., for fifty minutes.305 Dimitrov and Manuilsky, along with Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Orjonikidze, and Stalin, hammered out a telegram for the Chinese Communists that condemned Zhang’s move, “whatever his intentions,” as inciting Japanese aggression and a united imperialist bloc against China, and ordered the Chinese Communists to stand “decisively for a peaceful resolution of the conflict,” while enjoining the Nationalists to cease their attempted destruction of the Chinese Red Army and to unite for the struggle against Japanese imperialism. This was precisely Zhang’s position (which went unmentioned).306 In Xi’an on December 16, Zhang addressed the public in the central square, explaining that he had served, and would continue to serve, under Chiang, but that the generalissimo must engage the struggle against the Japanese. “Chiang thinks that he is the government,” Zhang stated. “Since he refuses to turn the guns against the enemy, and turns them against us, I had no alternative but to . . . arrest him.”307 The Nationalist executive committee and political council in Nanking, meanwhile, directed its Central Army toward Xi’an.308
Had Stalin been driven predominantly by vengeance, he would have ordered Chiang killed (or just let it happen). But Stalin acted from his sense of strategy. The same applied to his domestic terror.
Before being dismissed from Stalin’s office, Dimitrov was privy to a denunciation of Blum (“a charlatan. He’s no Largo Caballero”) and a discussion of the NKVD’s interrogation of Sokolnikov: “The investigation concludes that Trotsky abroad and the center of the bloc within the USSR entered into negotiations with the Hitlerite and Japanese governments . . . first, to provoke a war by Germany and Japan against the USSR; second, to promote the defeat of the USSR in that war and to take advantage of that defeat to achieve the transfer of power in the USSR to their government bloc; third, on behalf of the future bloc government, to guarantee territorial and economic concessions to the Hitlerite and Japanese governments.” Sokolnikov had joined the party in 1905, at age seventeen, been with Lenin on the sealed train in April 1917, signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which had ended up saving the fledgling regime in 1918, led the civil war reconquest of Turkestan in 1920, masterminded the NEP stabilization as finance commissar, and served as an effective ambassador to Britain. But it turned out he had all along been working to overthrow Soviet power. Sokolnikov was said to have confessed.309
Two days later, Dimitrov received the prominent German Jewish antifascist novelist Jacob Arje (b. 1884), known as Lion Feuchtwanger, and his common-law wife, Maria Osten (Gresshöner). “It is incomprehensible why the accused are admitting everything, knowing it will cost them their lives,” Feuchtwanger pointed out, regarding the trial of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. “It is incomprehensible why, apart from the confessions of the accused, no sort of evidence has been produced.” Feuchtwanger, a Soviet sympathizer, added that “the records of the trial” were “full of contradictions, unconvincing. The trial is conducted monstrously.”310
Dimitrov’s radiogram for the Chinese comrades arrived in Bao’an village on December 17 or 18. (Part of it had failed to transmit; Mao would read the full text only on December 20.) “Mao Zedong flew into a rage when the order came from Moscow to release Chiang” rather than to stage a trial and execution, wrote the youthful Communist sympathizer Edgar Snow, claiming to have heard from an eyewitness (the widow of Sun Yat-sen). “Mao swore and stamped his feet.”311 Mao, on December 19, said to an assembly of the Chinese politburo, “The Japanese say that the arrest [of Chiang] was arranged by the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union says that it was contrived by the Japanese.”312 That day, the Chinese Communists issued a statement that Zhang and his men “had acted on the basis of patriotic motives, honestly and with sincere zealotry for the fate of the nation.”313 Mao detested Chiang and any appearance of buckling under to Moscow, but Zhou, after trekking by donkey to see Mao, flew to Xi’an on a Zhang-supplied plane and ordered him not to harm Chiang, citing Stalin’s direct orders. Zhang was to release him after somehow extracting a promise of a renewed united front.314 Of course, this had been Zhang’s plan all along.
“KAUTSKY”
Stalin and Britain effectively shared the same goal in the Far East—prevention of a Japanese conquest of China—but British-Soviet negotiations between May and December 1936, on London’s initiative, for a bilateral pact on naval limitations failed. Britain continued to want to get other runners in the naval arms race to run more slowly, for a time, so that it could cross the finish line first. But the Soviets, like Nazi Germany, did not really want limitations. Even more, Moscow sought the most advanced British naval technology and technical assistance as part of its program to build an oceangoing fleet.315 Cooperation, not just on the sea, proved elusive, even though Stalin, the world leader of Communism, paradoxically was serving as Britain’s main bulwark against the spread of Communism: he was trying to force the Chinese Communists to help free Chiang and resume the coalition with the Nationalists against Japan, and having the Comintern direct the Spanish Communists to remain under the wing of the Popular Front government against Franco.
At the same time, Stalin ordered the Comintern to have the Spanish Communists intensify the “complete and final annihilation” of the Spanish “Trotskyites” as “agents of fascism.”316 Spain’s Communists, with the collusion of the anarchists, forced the POUM leader, Andreu Nin, out of the Catalan regional government.317 (The next month, Spain’s Communists would set upon the anarchists, too, arresting or assassinating their leaders.) Koltsov’s reportage in Pravda continued to fixate not on Franco but on the POUM, noting (December 17, 1936) that “the purge of the Trotskyite and anarcho-syndicalist elements” in Spain “will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR.”318 Koltsov soon infiltrated the POUM to write a hatchet piece; in an especially piquant passage, he would assert that the POUM newspaper (La Batalla) had “found its sole object of hatred and daily attack . . . not General Franco, not General Mola, not Italian and German fascism, but the Soviet Union.” Koltsov also wrote how Trotsky was supposedly giving directives to the POUM and how the POUM “had restructured in the usual Trotskyite fashion” in order to engage in “terrorism” (“provocations, raids, and murders”). He accused the POUM “Trotskyites” of attracting only riffraff and scum.319