Soaring revolutionary sentiments, full of bluster but also raw emotion, were erupting in the press of the high-profile French Communist party and the reports out of Spain by Communists and pro-Comintern leftists. China was radicalizing as well. On August 13, Stalin finally returned Dimitrov’s request for approval of the draft instructions for the Chinese Communists (he merely wrote “in favor”). Two days later, the instructions were radioed to Yan’an, concretizing the actions required under the united front policy, and warning, “It is incorrect to place Chiang Kai-shek on the same plane as the Japanese invaders.”97 Mao formally complied, writing to the Nationalists to request an end to their civil war and negotiations.98 But Dimitrov would have his hands full trying to enforce Mao’s compliance.
In Spain, the Soviet regime kept to the impression of providing only humanitarian aid voluntarily contributed by workers through trade unions (some 264 million rubles would be collected overall).99 But on August 21, 1936, the thirty-year-old Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen and his cinematographer Boris Makaseyev, who had been hastily dispatched to Spain by the politburo, managed to film a Canadian hunter (who had volunteered to fight for the Republic) shooting down an Italian bomber that had been raining destruction on the Republic’s side. A few days later, the world saw Karmen’s documentary footage, which conclusively proved “fascist” support for the Spanish putschists working to overthrow the elected Republic.100 On August 23, Italy cynically signed the Non-Intervention Agreement. The Soviets did so the same day. Germany would formally sign the next day. From this point, any violation of nonintervention by Moscow could serve as a pretext justifying Italian and German supply of arms to the insurgents.101
SHOWCASE TRIAL
Yezhov was furiously driving extraction of “testimony” for the trial of a “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center” in Moscow. On August 10, he confronted Pyatakov with documents from his opposition days that had been seized at the apartment of his arrested ex-wife. Pyatakov demanded a chance to prove his loyalty, requesting, as Yezhov wrote to Stalin, that “they allow him personally to shoot all those sentenced to be shot at the upcoming trial, including his former wife,” an assignment Pyatakov wanted broadcast. Stalin was only interested that Pyatakov smear himself and others.102 It was a few days later, late on the night of August 13, that the dictator, after holding a Kremlin banquet for Soviet aviators who had completed the first nonstop flight from Moscow to the Soviet Far East, departed for his annual southern holiday. That day, TASS issued a venomous press release about a trial for treason to commence in a few days with sixteen defendants, including Zinoviev and Kamenev and, in absentia, Trotsky (then fishing in a small Norwegian village). Stalin tasked Kaganovich with implementing the trial’s final push. Before the trial, Vasily Ulrich, chairman of the military collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, presented drafts of the sentences, which Stalin approved, and the Soviet press demanded “no leniency for enemies of the people who have tried to deprive the people of their leaders.”103
Also on August 14, the NKVD arrested Vitali Primakov, commander of the Leningrad military district and a hero of the civil war. Six days later, the same fate befell Vitovt Putna, Soviet military attaché to Great Britain (and before that to Japan, Germany, and Finland). Primakov and Putna were charged with “Trotskyism” and participation in a military “plot.” Many Red Army officers had had interactions with them.
The five-day trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite center commenced on August 19, in the October Hall of white Corinthian columns in the House of Trade Unions.104 The spectacle followed an extended period of behind-the-scenes torture, scripting, and rehearsing, and this time it would result not in mere exile or imprisonment. The defendants, besides the five German Communists who “confessed” to Gestapo ties, were eleven prominent Bolsheviks of the 1926–27 opposition.105 Ten of the sixteen happened to be Jewish (this received no special attention). Invited audience members numbered some 150 people, including 30 handpicked foreign journalists and diplomats, as well as many plainclothes NKVD operatives, but not the relatives of the accused. Despite slipups that betrayed the fabrication, the defendants, all Communists, publicly confessed to being wreckers, spies, terrorists.106 (Kaganovich made sure to add himself and Orjonikidze to the list of targets.)107 “I, Kamenev, together with Zinoviev and Trotsky, organized and guided this conspiracy,” Stalin’s former close associate stated. “I had become convinced that the party’s—Stalin’s—policy was successful and victorious. We, the opposition, had banked on a split in the party, but this hope proved groundless. We could no longer count on any serious domestic difficulties to allow us to overthrow Stalin’s leadership.”
Some of the “testimony” had implicated rightists (Rykov, Bukharin, Tomsky), and Kaganovich and Yezhov (August 20) had jointly telegrammed Stalin in Sochi asking for instructions on that score. The next day, the dictator permitted mention at the trial of the rightists, as well as a yet-to-be-unveiled “parallel center” (Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, Radek). On that day, Izvestiya published an essay by Radek, who, as a former Trotsky supporter, lent his credibility to the wild charges against Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev, calling the attempts to assassinate the Soviet leader and the links to the Gestapo “a plot to restore capitalism in the USSR.”108 Stalin had also been prompted to remember the out-of-favor poet Demyan Bedny, who published “No Mercy!” in Pravda (August 21): “Here are the ones who murdered Kirov! . . . They were going for Stalin!”109
Testifying to these fixations, Stalin’s holiday correspondence changed. It remained laconic and often ill-humored, sometimes downright scolding, with almost no personal information—just directives and responses to initiatives by Kaganovich (or Molotov). But content-wise, of the more than 140 letters and ciphered telegrams he exchanged during this holiday, a mere half dozen concerned the industrial economy, and most of those involved the dictator approving others’ proposals, without comment.110 Now the mailbag also included the transcript of a Tomsky speech, interrogation “protocols” of Kamenev, draft protocols of Sokolnikov’s interrogation. (Stalin: “Did he not inform [the British journalist] of the plans for the assassination of Soviet leaders? Of course he did.”) Such documents were pointing to a vast, phantasmagoric conspiracy, from party officials to military men. Bukharin, hiking the Pamirs in Central Asia, had hurried back to Moscow to find Stalin away on holiday, and would write the dictator a letter, which also found its way into the holiday mailbag, rabidly endorsing all the fabricated charges of the trial, except those about himself (“I embrace you, for I’m clean”).111 Trotsky, who hurriedly returned to Oslo from his fishing holiday, told the New York Times that the trial was fraudulent and “puts the Dreyfus scandal and the Reichstag fire trial in the shadow.”112