As for Tomsky, when his driver arrived at his dacha outside Moscow to pick him up for his job as head of the state publishing house—bearing a copy of that morning’s Pravda (August 22), which reported an investigation into Tomsky for counterrevolution—he shot himself. Tomsky prepared a suicide note (“Dear Comrade Stalin”), expressing his despair while protesting his innocence, and beseeching the dictator, whom he called his “old fighting comrade,” not to believe Zinoviev’s slander against him. Tomsky apologized, yet again, for his comment one evening in 1928 that someone would shoot Stalin. “Do not take seriously what I blurted out then—I have deeply regretted this always.”113 Pravda reported the suicide the next day as an admission of guilt.114 In an act of attempted posthumous revenge that played on Stalin’s conspiratorial bent, Tomsky cleverly implicated NKVD chief Yagoda as a rightist coconspirator, having his wife convey orally the “secret” that Yagoda was the person who had “recruited” Tomsky.115
Kamenev and Stalin had known each other for more than three decades. “Greetings, friend! I kiss you on the nose, Eskimo-style,” Stalin had written to him in December 1912, evoking their Siberian exile. “For hell’s sake! I miss you devilishly. I miss you—I swear by my dog. I have no one, no one to chat with, heart to heart, may the devil run you over.”116 On the eve of Kamenev’s execution, Stalin wrote to Kaganovich that Kamenev, through his wife, had sounded out the French ambassador about supporting a possible Trotskyite-Zinovievite government. “I believe Kamenev also sounded out the English, German, and American ambassadors,” Stalin added. “This means Kamenev was supposed to reveal to these foreigners the plans for the conspiracy and the murder of the leaders of the party. This also means Kamenev had already revealed the plans to them, for otherwise the foreigners would not have begun talking about the future Trotskyite-Zinovievite ‘government’ with him.”117 Did Stalin believe this? Was he straining to justify his political murders to Kaganovich? These questions remain unanswerable.
Stalin supervised the trial from afar, sternly instructing Kaganovich that the sentences had to mention Trotsky and Sedov. (“This carries enormous significance for Europe, both for the bourgeoisie and for the workers.”)118 A few hours after the court had adjourned on August 24, Ulrich, at 2:30 a.m., pronounced the defendants guilty and condemned all but one to death. Later that day, the regime staged a grand aviation display at Moscow’s Tushinsky Aerodrome (“Glory to Stalinist aviation and the Stalinist falcons”). Planes flew difficult maneuvers. Parachutists dropped from the sky. “The enemies’ schemes,” a teacher in the Institute of World Economy and International Relations recorded in his diary, “cannot stop our enormous successes.”119 Kamenev and the others wrote appeals for mercy in the predawn hours. (Only one defendant expressly refused to do so.) Perhaps, as would be rumored, Stalin had promised them their lives in exchange for public “confessions” to crimes they had not committed.120 But well before the end of the seventy-two-hour period for appeals specified in Soviet law, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and the rest were executed in the cellars.121 Yezhov retrieved the bullet casings as souvenirs.
FORCING MASS HYSTERIA
The day after the August 13, 1936, discussion of Spain in the Little Corner, Stalin received a résumé of Soviet-Spanish diplomatic relations from Krestinsky, which accelerated a belated exchange of ambassadors. The choice fell to a twenty-year veteran of the Soviet diplomatic corps, Marcel Rosenberg, who was summoned from Karlsbad.122 Litvinov had written to Kaganovich urging that people appointed as ambassadors in major countries should know the local language, while lamenting that the foreign affairs commissariat had only a single fluent Spanish speaker: Leonid Gaikis, a Lithuanian who had grown up in Argentina and was serving as consul general in Istanbul. Litvinov felt constrained to inform Kaganovich, with a copy to Stalin, that in 1923 Gaikis had voted for the Trotskyite platform. Stalin did not prevent Gaikis’s appointment as an “adviser” in the embassy in Madrid, effectively Rosenberg’s deputy.123 A bit later, Stalin would consent to the establishment of a consulate in Catalonia and the appointment there of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, the hero of the 1917 storming of the Winter Palace—also a repentant former Trotsky sympathizer. The consul would tell Ilya Ehrenburg, who would go to Spain as an Izvestiya correspondent, that his key task would consist of making the Spanish anarchists “see reason.”124
Before Stalin had gone on holiday, the politburo had first approved a Pravda request to send a special correspondent to Spain, Mikhail Koltsov, the Soviet Union’s best-known journalist-propagandist.125 During the 1920s and ’30s, he had published more than a thousand stylistically free-flowing essays, including on collectivization (“Fortress in the Steppe”), driving a taxi in Moscow, and flying in the first Soviet-made airplane. Koltsov could do what almost no one else could: toe the Stalinist line while delivering enduring portraits of Soviet life. He had a sense of humor, too, founding Crocodile, the Soviet humor magazine, and had even been to Spain, following the fall of its monarchy, and published Spanish Spring (1933).126 By August 8, 1936, he’d arrived in Madrid, and over the next several weeks he managed to compose twenty reports for Pravda, relayed by telephone to Moscow. “A stocky little Jew with a huge head and one of the most expressive faces of any man I ever met,” Claud Cockburn, a British journalist who encountered Koltsov in Spain, would recall. “He unquestionably and positively enjoyed the sense of danger and sometimes—by his political indiscretions, for instance, or still more wildly indiscreet love affairs—deliberately created dangers which need not have existed.”127 Koltsov’s engaging reportage for Soviet readers would render Spain’s civil war immediate and in Stalin’s preferred light: as a struggle not just against fascism per se but against Trotskyism—indeed, against a supposed linkup between Trotskyism and fascism.128
Was there Trotskyism in Spain? Spain’s Popular Front government consisted of representatives of its Republican parties, which received support from the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (only nominally united), the Syndicalist Party and various anarchist formations (at least initially), Basque separatists, the Spanish Communist party, and the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). The latter, formed in 1935, consisted of breakaway left Communists and dissident Marxist-Leninists who demanded an immediate transition to a dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain, precisely Trotsky’s position. The leading theorist of the POUM, Andreu Nin, had spent nine years in Moscow as secretary general of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern) and had sided with Trotsky’s left opposition. Nin broke with Moscow and had a falling-out with the exiled Trotsky as well. In spring 1936, Trotsky had set his followers the task of exposing “the full wretchedness of the leadership of the ‘Workers Party of Marxist Unification’ and especially of the former ‘Left Communists’ . . . before the eyes of all the advanced workers.”129 On August 10, 1936, Victor Serge—an intellectual Stalin had released into foreign exile, who was now busy translating Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed into French—begged Trotsky to take back his harsh words about the POUM, “to deny the bureaucracy any possibility whatsoever of turning the revolution into a prison for workers in the Stalinist manner.” But Trotsky continued to lacerate the POUM for supposedly vacillating between support of the “bourgeois” democratic phase of Spain’s revolution and of Trotsky’s Fourth International (full-bore anticapitalist revolution).130