On the evening of December 5, the Congress of Soviets concluded by adopting the new constitution unanimously. The next day was devoted to a mass celebration of the adoption on Red Square. On December 7, the plenum resumed. Despite the venom, it ended without expulsions, let alone arrests. Stalin proposed “considering the matter of Bukharin and Rykov unfinished” and postponing a decision until the next plenum.282 Adding to the mystery, this plenum, uniquely for the 1930s, went unmentioned in the press. That same press took to slandering Bukharin and Rykov still more ferociously. Especially noteworthy was that much of the bile flowed in Izvestiya, where Bukharin remained listed as editor. “My morale,” Bukharin wrote in a letter (December 15), “is in such a state that I am half-alive.”283
KIDNAP
Stalin judged that a Communist takeover in China would never produce a regime strong enough to hold off the Japanese military. After the Chinese comrades formed revolutionary soviets, against Moscow’s advice, he had Dimitrov insist on “soviets—only in the cities, but not as organs of power, rather of organization of the masses. Without confiscations.”284 But the “united front” resembled a sandcastle on the beach. The Nationalists were not interested, either.285 A Japanese envoy arrived on a warship at Nanking, the Nationalist capital, and demanded that China grant Japan the right to place troops anywhere in China to fight Communists. Chiang Kai-shek refused to conduct negotiations himself over the request, and the envoy’s talks with Chiang’s foreign minister went nowhere. (Chiang insisted that Japan respect China’s administrative integrity in northern China, which Japan continued to violate.) But rumors of a possible Chinese entry into the Anti-Comintern Pact had alarmed Stalin. Chiang was also pressing his campaign to eradicate the Chinese Communist base in Shaanxi, while demanding, in negotiations with them in Shanghai, that they bring their Red Army strictly under his Nanking government.286
Events on the ground, however, had their own dynamic—and their import potentially exceeded that of Spain, for Stalin and for the world.
The warlord Zhang Xueliang, known as the Young Marshal, had traveled to Italy, then Germany, courting Mussolini, then Hitler and Göring, for help against Japan. In France he had met Litvinov, asking to be received by Stalin in Moscow; Stalin declined, concerned about not complicating his relations with Japan.287 Zhang had returned to China and eventually entered into negotiations with the Chinese Communists; one of his interlocutors was Zhou Enlai, who got the Young Marshal not only to cease operations against the Chinese Communists but to supply them with weapons. The Communists contemplated trying to secretly admit Zhang to the party.288 In November 1936, Zhang wrote to Chiang Kai-shek, imploring him to pursue a united front with the Communists against Japan in earnest. In December, Zhang traveled to Nanking in person to report about the mutinous moods of his troops in Shaanxi, who were supposed to pursue the Communists, and renewed his pleading. Chiang told him, according to Zhang, that if the government pulled back from fighting the Chinese Communists to take on Japan, the Communists would eventually win hold of the nation.289
Chiang ordered Zhang to intensify the “bandit suppression” campaign to finish off the Communists.290 But Zhang urged Chiang to go to Xi’an and talk to the Shaanxi and Manchurian soldiers. Chiang’s entourage warned against such a trip, but exposure to danger had typically enhanced Chiang’s stature, and he agreed to go. Back in Xi’an, Zhang reported on the conversation, in general terms, by radiogram to Mao, whose “party center” was holed up in dank caves (one bodyguard was stung by a scorpion).291 Chiang flew off to Xi’an with an extra guard detail and contingent of officers, moving into a hot-springs resort, a small walled enclave ten miles outside the district town of Lintong. In an ancient one-story pavilion once used by the Tang emperor Xuanzong, Chiang received delegations of the Shaanxi and Northeast (Manchurian) armies.292 At dawn on December 12, his scheduled day of departure, a 200-man contingent of Zhang’s personal guard stormed the walled compound. A gun battle killed many of Chiang’s bodyguards. He heard the shots, was told the attackers wore fur caps (the headgear of the Manchurian troops), crawled out a window, scaled the compound’s high wall, and ran along a dry moat up a barren hill, accompanied by one bodyguard and one aide. He slipped and fell, losing his false teeth and injuring his back, and sought refuge in a cave on the snow-covered mountain. The next morning, the leader of China—shivering, toothless, barefoot, a robe over his nightshirt—was captured.
Whether Zhang acted on his own or in a conspiracy with the Communists remains uncertain. He was an opium-addled playboy—one mistress was Mussolini’s daughter—but also an anti-Japanese patriot. Perhaps in his earnestness for a united front he had gotten caught up in the intrigues of Zhou and Mao. The wily Chiang, for his part, had been negotiating in bad faith with Zhou Enlai (Chiang’s former political commissar at the Soviet-financed 1920s Whampoa Military Academy).293 News of Chiang’s pending arrest—or admonishment—in Xi’an had reached Mao’s makeshift headquarters via the dilapidated village of Bao’an in the early-morning hours of December 12. His secretary passed him the radiogram. “After reading it, [he] joyfully exclaimed, ‘How about that! Time for bed. Tomorrow there will be good news!’”294
Chiang, upon being taken into custody, was speechless. (He has himself telling his captors, “I am the Generalissimo. Kill me, but do not subject me to indignities.”)295 Zhang’s head bodyguard carried Chiang to a car and set off for a government office in Xi’an. Zhang, standing at attention, addressed him as commander in chief. “I wish to lay my views before your excellency, the generalissimo,” Zhang said to his captive, pleading with him to work with the Communists in a patriotic coalition. Zhang had aides draft formal proposals for a united “National Salvation” government, an immediate end to the civil war, and a release and pardon of all political prisoners. He also requested that the Chinese Communists receive an invitation to send a delegation to Xi’an.296 Chiang repeatedly denounced him as a rebel. “Your bad temper,” Zhang replied, “is always the cause of trouble.”297
Chiang’s surprise capture would seem to have offered Moscow a chance to discredit him as incompetent in the anti-Japanese crusade and to exact revenge. After all, this was the same Chiang who had humiliated Stalin with a massacre of Chinese Communists in 1927 and, subsequently, had nearly destroyed the Chinese Red Army in a series of ruthless encirclement campaigns. Word reached Moscow that same day of December 13. “Optimistic, favorable assessment regarding Zhang Xueliang,” crowed the normally restrained Dimitrov, in his diary.298 Dimitrov’s Chinese assistant in the Comintern recalled that “you could not find anyone” who did not feel “Chiang must be finished off.” Manuilsky, he added, “rubbed his hands, embraced me, and exclaimed, ‘Our dear friend has been caught, aha!’”299 That same day, Mao was even more gleeful. “Chiang has owed us a blood debt as high as a mountain,” he was quoted as exclaiming at a meeting in his cave. “Now it is time to liquidate the blood debt. Chiang must be brought to Bao’an for a public trial.”300 Mao sent congratulations to Zhang, whom he called China’s “national leader in resisting Japan.”301