its army were not encouraging. His instinct was to pull out of Spain and disband the International Brigades in the event that Germany and Italy were also to withdraw; but for the moment he insisted on a merger of the communist and socialist parties in Spain.15 This immediately became Comintern policy. Yet the inter-party negotiations in Spain made little progress: years of mutual antagonism could not be discounted overnight. Nor did Stalin help the situation by deploying NKVD agents to seek out and liquidate Spanish Trotskyists. Distrust on the political left grew rapidly as members of the POUM, loyal to Trotski’s ideas, were rounded up. Remorselessly the Spanish Communist Party reinforced its influence in the government.
The situation changed from month to month and the socialists refused to do the bidding of the Spanish Communist Party. By February 1938 Stalin had concluded that the communists should resign from the government. Dimitrov in Moscow and Togliatti in Spain complied with the decision despite the disarray it was bound to cause in the anti-Franco alliance.16 The political tensions on the left were not concocted out of nothing by Stalin. But he made them murderously worse than they need have been; and if anyone thought that his accusations against internal victims in the USSR were merely an instrument of despotism without genuine importance for him, they were disillusioned by events in Spain. Exactly the same political persecutions were put in train. Stalin was determined that the far-left elements on the Republican side should be liquidated before they could infect the Spanish Communist Party with their diseased purposes. Of course there were plenty of leftists in Spain who by their own profession were Trotskyists, anarchists or independent communists. Stalin had no need to ponder the options: he knew he had to cauterise the wound of far-left pluralism. Spain was going to be helped on the terms of his political homicidalism.
The Civil War had by then turned decisively in Franco’s favour. By March 1939 it was over. The Republicans had lost the protracted struggle against reactionary forces backed by German and Italian fascism. Stalin’s policy was criticised by Trotski as excessively cautious. For Trotski, the Spanish Civil War offered one of those regular opportunities to spread revolution west of the USSR and to undermine the political far right across Europe. Stalin, though, was mindful of the risks he would run with any strong intervention. Always he dreaded thrusting the French and British governments into the arms of General Franco. Too obvious a communist hegemony over the Spanish government coalition might easily have brought this about. But he and the Comintern at least did something, and it is hardly likely that the Republicans would have held out so long if he had not sanctioned the Spanish Communist Party’s participation. His Trotskyist critics accused him of excessive pragmatism in his management of Soviet foreign policy. They ignored the limited resources available to the USSR. Economically, militarily and — above all — geographically there was no serious chance for him to do more than he achieved at the time.
If he could not have done much more to help, however, he could certainly have done less to hinder. His behaviour towards the Spanish political left, especially in the suppression of the POUM, rightly earned him the opprobrium of George Orwell in
35. APPROACHES TO WAR
Domestic politics, state security and foreign policy were knotted together in the late 1930s. Stalin arrested hundreds of thousands of harmless Soviet citizens who were of an awkward national ancestry. Poles, Finns, Chinese and Koreans resident in border areas next to the states of their co-nationals were routinely deported to other distant regions of the USSR. Even the Greeks living in the Soviet republics by the Black Sea, hundreds of maritime miles from Greece, suffered this fate.1 Soviet state security policy had a national and ethnic dimension. While promoting the press and schooling for non-Russians in the Soviet multinational state, Stalin showed an intense hostility to some among them. What has become known as ethnic cleansing was not new to the USSR. The Politburo had practised such a policy against Cossacks in the north Caucasus at the end of the Civil War.2 Proposals for cleansing on the basis of nationality resurfaced at the start of the Five-Year Plan.3 But Stalin’s deportations, arrests and executions during and after the Great Terror mounted to a higher scale of national and ethnic repression.
The application of this policy did not exclude card-carrying communists in the Soviet Union. Stalin’s zeal to make the country safe from subversion from abroad went to the point of the extermination of the Communist Party of Poland exiles in Moscow. Polish communists were especially suspect to him. Several of their leaders had sympathised with Soviet internal oppositions in the 1920s. Earlier still, many of them had sided with the Polish Marxist leader and theorist Rosa Luxemburg against Lenin before the Great War. Stalin had anyway always fretted about the menace posed by Poland to the USSR. He was easily convinced by reports from Yezhov’s NKVD that the Polish exile community had been infiltrated by the intelligence agencies of the Western capitalist powers. Stalin was in no mind in November 1937 to treat people on an individual basis: he demanded the entire party’s dissolution. Dimitrov, himself a Bulgarian exile in Moscow, docilely complied and wrote to Stalin for procedural advice. Stalin replied with the blunt demand that Dimitrov should show a sense of urgency: ‘The dissolution is about two years late.’4 Already several Polish communist leaders were in the Lubyanka. The NKVD swiftly picked up the remainder, and most of the prisoners were shot.
Dimitrov’s obedience did not save the Comintern from Stalin’s suspicions. Scores of functionaries in its Executive Committee as well as its various departments were executed. No exemption was given to emissaries serving in Spain who were loyally slaughtering the POUM. Stalin and Yezhov tricked many of them back from Madrid and had them killed. Stalin was blunt to Dimitrov, raging that ‘all of you in the Comintern are hand in glove with the enemy’.5 In Moscow he could carry out the purge he desired. Abroad he got Dimitrov to compel the freely operating communist parties — few though they had become — in France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and the USA — to expel members who refused to support the official line or who had sympathised with Stalin’s opponents in the past. This punitive atmosphere pervaded the worldwide communist movement. Stalin wanted only such support abroad as was unmistakably loyal.
As the Republicans went down to defeat in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin’s interest reverted to the French Communist Party and its policy toward Leon Blum’s socialist government. French communist leader Maurice Thorez, like his counterparts elsewhere in Europe, had been wary of the turn towards the popular front; but, having accepted it, he proposed to join Blum’s cabinet in 1936. Permission had to be sought in Moscow. When Moscow demurred, Thorez obeyed Moscow.6 Always the Kremlin kept tight tutelage and Stalin was in command. The chief restriction on his manoeuvres was the quality of information reaching him from the Executive Committee of the Comintern as well as from France and other countries; and leaders such as Thorez, much as they strove to please Stalin, draped their messages in the cloth of their political preferences. Stalin had confidence in the system of decision-making he had established. He also functioned according to his general assumptions about global developments. While recognising the importance of international relations, he could not afford to spend most of his time on them if he was to secure the kind of internal transformation he sought — and in the late 1930s the carrying through of the bloody mass purges remained his first priority. Only an extraordinarily decisive Leader could operate as he did on the European and Asian political stage.
This was obvious in his intervention in the affairs of the Chinese Communist Party. Stalin continued to demand that Mao Tse-tung maintain the alliance with Chiang Kai-shek. Although Mao thought that Stalin overrated the Chinese nationalist movement — the Kuomintang — led by Chiang Kai-shek, he sorely needed financial and political assistance from Moscow. ‘United front’ tactics were demanded by Stalin, and Mao had to accede. Since being suppressed by the Kuomintang in 1927, the Chinese Communist Party had regrouped. The Long March had been undertaken in 1934 to the north of China, where Mao consolidated the party’s support in the villages. The Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party remained intensely hostile to each other. Mutual suspicion spilled over into sporadic violence. Civil war was prevented only by the external threat posed by militarist Japan. The Japanese, who had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and set up the Manchukuo puppet state, plainly contemplated further territorial expansion. To Stalin, who as usual thought in broad geopolitical categories and desired to enhance the immediate security of the USSR, it seemed best for Mao and Chiang to put aside their rivalry; this was the
