Tens of thousands of workers and people’s militias who were sacrificing their lives to save the Republic were cowards and fascist hirelings.
That December of 1936, Stalin again suffered from a high temperature, as well as tonsillitis. It had been a while since he had countenanced medical observation. His staff summoned Dr. Ivan Valedinsky to the Near Dacha. Valedinsky, who had not seen Stalin since 1931, brought a heart specialist, Vladimir Vinogradov, and a throat infection specialist, Boris Preobrazhensky. They diagnosed a reemergence of follicular angina from arteriosclerosis. The elevated temperature lasted five days.320 But Stalin hosted a Kremlin reception for top NKVD operatives on December 20, 1936, the nineteenth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka, and that same day attended a congress of wives of Red Army commanders in the Grand Kremlin Palace. On December 21, he celebrated his official fifty-seventh birthday with his inner circle, the military brass, and relatives, but without his children. “A mass of guests,” Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary, “all dressed up, noisy, lively, dancing to the radio, went home toward 7:00 a.m.”321
The dictator had managed some official business that day. In a letter to Prime Minister Largo Caballero, dated December 21, Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov reiterated that they wanted to “prevent the enemies of Spain from regarding it as a Communist Republic” and offered political advice, as if to a pupil (“Pay attention to the peasants” and “Draw the petite and middle urban bourgeoisie onto the side of the government”). “It is quite possible,” the message noted, “that in Spain, the parliamentary road will prove more appropriate toward revolutionary development than was the case in Russia.”322 The message dripped with Marxist revisionism. Consider that an evolutionary path somehow bringing about socialism was precisely what the Italian Comintern official Palmiro Togliatti believed in—and he was referred to in Soviet ciphered telegrams as “Kautsky,” the German Social Democrat whom Lenin had denounced.323
WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
Hermann Göring had invited Surits to his home on Leipziger Platz, according to the Soviet envoy, and on December 14, 1936, he delivered a monologue about Germany’s Four-Year Plan and how bilateral economic relations “should be built without regard to the state of our political relations,” that is, “apoliticized.” Göring allowed that some items on the list submitted by Kandelaki could be purchased, but most could have been expected only to elicit a negative response: no state could sell such top-secret objects to another. Surits protested. Göring mollified him, citing Bismarck regarding the need for strong ties between Germany and Russia.324 Ten days later, Kandelaki and a colleague met fruitlessly with Schacht (whose star had waned with Göring’s rise over the economy). To the now perpetual Soviet inquiries about a political rapprochement, Schacht retorted that it would be possible if the Soviets ended their “encirclement” of Germany by quitting Spain, France (in the guise of the Popular Front), and Czechoslovakia (the mutual assistance pact). Kandelaki returned to Moscow for consultations. The Soviet hopes incited by Göring’s elevation to plenipotentiary looked illusory.
Mongolia served as Stalin’s other linchpin in Soviet eastern defense, alongside China, and on December 23, 1936, he received yet another delegation from the livestock-herding nation, led by the new prime minister, Anandyn Amar, in Molotov’s office. “In olden times the Mongols beat the Chinese,” Stalin said. “Defending themselves against you, they built the Great Chinese Wall.” Amar: “All the territory up to the Great Chinese Wall belonged to us, Mongols.” Voroshilov (smiling): “You have imperialist aims.”325 The Soviets would have to spend still more money to shore up its feeble satellite.
In China, Zhou Enlai, aware of the Communists’ utter dependence on the Soviet Union for weapons and supplies, was shrewd enough to follow Stalin’s orders, not Mao’s. Zhou also enjoyed unusual sway with Zhang, who listened to few others. Chiang, however, refused to negotiate his release by agreeing to a renewed united front. British and U.S. military attachés who went to Xi’an encouraged Chiang to draw out the standoff, and he gave hints that he might order resumption of his encirclement campaign. But the generalissimo finally relented. One source of pressure was his wayward son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who had denounced his father as an enemy and, with his Russian wife, was studying in the Soviet Union—that is, he was in Stalin’s hands. A telegram was sent to the Chinese Communists stressing that in talks with Chiang the possible return of his son should be mentioned. On December 25 morning, Chiang belatedly received Zhou, who saluted his former commander, a sign of Communist obedience, and, on verbal promises of a renewed united front, agreed to his release.326 As Chiang prepared to depart Xi’an, at 2:00 p.m. on December 26, a coolie appeared, carrying a suitcase, followed by a guilt-ridden Zhang, who announced that he was surrendering and wanted to accompany Chiang and his entourage back to Nanking. Chiang appears to have pardoned him.327 They took off in Zhang’s Boeing, Chiang sitting in the copilot’s seat.
Chiang had been right about the upside of his risky visit to Xi’an: throngs cheered his return to the Nanking capital that December 26. (Two months later, Chiang would compare his ordeal at Xi’an with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.)328 His inner circle now urged him to go on the offensive and wipe out the Communists once and for all.329 The three Communist armies in the northern Shaanxi region totaled perhaps 50,000 troops, of whom fewer than 30,000 possessed weapons, and they had no air force. Chiang’s armies numbered more than 2 million, of whom 300,000 had been trained by the Germans (many carried German-made weapons), with 314 fighter planes and 600 pilots. His political authority was also colossal. But the generalissimo’s proven ability for treachery yielded before his recognition of China’s need for foreign assistance, and he honored the promise he made to Zhou and Zhang to carry out Stalin’s united front policy. Chiang assigned specific territory to the Communists and funded their separate administration and army, controlled by Mao. Stalin held Chiang’s son to ensure the promises were kept.330
Had Chiang been killed, Chinese accommodation with Japan, at Soviet expense, was a likely outcome. With Chiang’s death, the top Nationalist officials Wang Jingwei, who strenuously opposed cooperation with the USSR, and He Yingqin, China’s war minister, a graduate of the Japanese Military Academy and one of the key architects of the civil war against the Communists, could have established a new government to cooperate with Japan. (Zhang Qun, the foreign minister in Chiang’s government, had also been educated in Japan.) This could have resulted in a Japanese thrust northward, into Soviet territory, instead of southward in Asia—and therefore no Pearl Harbor or war with the United States.331
Conversely, had Chiang not gone to Xi’an and been kidnapped and ultimately released, he would likely have crushed the Chinese Communists and killed or chased Mao out to Mongolia or Siberia, without forfeiting Stalin’s military aid. In the event, not only Chiang but also the Chinese Communists survived, even thrived, becoming more associated publicly with the national anti-Japanese struggle. These would prove to be momentous developments.
“POPPYCOCK”
On December 30, 1936, Stalin sent Bukharin a New Year’s “gift”: a packet of others’ “testimony” incriminating him in foul deeds.332 Stalin also held a banquet for his physicians and, amid toasts to Soviet medicine, suddenly announced that there were enemies among the doctors. Molotov stood and thanked the physician-professors for helping to make Stalin better while attributing his recovery to the dictator’s robust constitution. After dinner, Stalin brought in a Radiola for dancing.333 Meanwhile, the January 1937 editorial of The Communist International, written in Stalin’s signature style of questions and answers, pointedly noted that “the Spanish Trotskyites conduct themselves like the advanced guard of the notorious ‘fifth column’ of Franco insurgents. Is it possible to support the heroic struggle of the Spanish popular masses without fighting against the traitorous Trotskyite band? No, it is impossible.”334 La Batalla, the POUM’s organ, responded that “Stalin is destroying, without looking back, everything that opposes him. . . . Stalin maintains his incontestable power with terror.”335