HOW THE NKVD FRAMED THE POUM

INTRODUCTION

THE CONTROVERSY over Land and Freedom, Ken Loach’s film about the Spanish Civil War, has focused attention on the tragic fate of the anti-Stalinist socialist party, the POUM.¹ This account of the POUM’s suppression in 1937 is taken from the memoirs of Jesús Hernández, published in 1953 in Mexico as Yo fuí un ministro de Stalin (I Was a Minister of Stalin) and in a French version as La Grande Trahison (The Great Betrayal).

At the time of the Civil War, Hernández was a leading figure in the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), which he had joined in Bilbao at its foundation in 1920 while still in his teens. He spent the early 1930s in Moscow as a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, before returning to Spain to become one of the sixteen Communist deputies elected to the Cortes in February 1936. He was a Communist minister in the Popular Front governments of both Largo Caballero and Negrín and was then appointed commissar-­general of the Republican armies of the centre and south.

Throughout the Civil War Hernández acted publicly as a loyal exponent of Comintern strategy. Following the rebellion by Generals Franco and Mola in July 1936, he was quick to deny that the Spanish Communists had any revolutionary aims, even in the long term. Writing in August 1936 in the PCE daily Mundo Obrero, he declared that it was ‘absolutely false that the present workers’ movement has for its object the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship after the war has terminated.... We Communists are the first to repudiate this supposition. We are motivated exclusively by a desire to defend the democratic republic’.² And this at a time when the democratic republic had pretty well collapsed. The government was powerless, the bulk of the repressive state apparatus had gone over to Franco, military resistance to the fascists was in the hands of the armed working class, workers had taken control of factories, transport and communications, and peasants were seizing and in many cases collectivising the land – a revolutionary situation if ever there was one.

Hernández’s differences with the PCE developed only after Franco’s victory. Following the death of general secretary José Díaz in 1942, Hernández challenged Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) for the party leadership. He failed, and consequently was expelled from the PCE in 1944. Later, impressed by the Yugoslavs’ defiance of Stalin, he set up an Independent Spanish Communist Party based in Belgrade, but it never gained any influence. He died in exile in Mexico in 1971.

The central theme of Hernández’s memoirs, reflecting the author’s then Titoite sympathies, is the need for Communist parties to determine their own actions in accordance with the situation in their own countries. So, although he condemns the way in which intervention by NKVD and Comintern agents in Spain undermined the authority of the national leadership, he does not offer the sort of fundamental reassessment of the Communists’ Popular Front strategy made by another former party leader, Fernando Claudín, in his book The Communist Movement.³ The frame-up of the POUM is itself depicted by Hernández as arising exclusively from Stalin’s need to justify the extermination of his opponents within the Soviet Union. He ignores the fact that the PCE’s commitment to re-establishing the power of the bourgeois state and defending the rights of capitalist property necessarily involved the suppression of those like the POUM who, however inconsistently, opposed the destruction of the revolutionary gains made by the Spanish working class in July-August 1936.

Nevertheless, Hernández does provide a detailed inside account of developments within the PCE leadership and the Republican government. His exposure of the role of the Soviet security service, the NKVD, in framing the POUM as a fascist organisation and murdering its leader Andrés Nin⁴ is of particular importance. Hernández’s tribute to the courage of Nin, who despite the most appalling tortures refused to sign the false confession which would have led to the deaths of his comrades, would alone justify reprinting this account. As Hugh Thomas wrote of Nin’s murder in his hook The Spanish Civil War, ‘the crime reverberates through the years, as do all the contemporaneous crimes in Russia’.⁵

At the time, needless to say, the Communist Party of Great Britain gave wholehearted support to the frame-up and suppression of the POUM. In 1938, just before the surviving POUM leaders were put on trial for espionage, the Communist publishing house Lawrence and Wishart issued a pamphlet by the French Stalinist journalist Georges Soria entitled Trotskyism In the Service of Franco: A Documented Record of Treachery by the POUM in Spain. This included excerpts from and photographic reproductions of documents forged by the NKVD in order to implicate the POUM in a Falangist spy ring. With regard to Nin’s murder, Soria claimed that the POUM leader was freed from prison by fellow fascists and had then disappeared. ‘From that moment’, according to Soria, ‘in spite of the most intensive search by the police, no trace of Nin has been found and no one has any idea where he is, whether he is a refugee in one of the foreign embassies which provide such generous hospitality to the Fascists of Franco’s Fifth Column; or whether he managed to get through to the rebel territory and preserve his anonymity in order not to compromise his friends who are in Republican jails.’⁶

British Communists today, most of whom would now recognise Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union for the atrocities they were, still baulk at confronting the truth about Stalinist atrocities in Spain. Back in 1976, it is true, Monty Johnstone was prepared to accept that ‘NKVD agents were sent into Spain and carried out measures of repression against honest revolutionaries, such as Andrés Nin’.⁷ More typical, however, was the Our History pamphlet on the Spanish Civil War, published around the same time, in which Johnstone’s fellow CPers Nan Green and Alonso Elliott referred dismissively to ‘stories about "NKVD agents" in Spain’ and opined that ‘most of them are apocryphal’. Concerning Nin’s murder, these writers stated blandly that it took place following ‘his disappearance in mysterious circumstances’.⁸ Noreen Branson, in the third volume of the official history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, agreed that Nin was ‘almost certainly executed’ but was similarly reticent about naming the authors of the crime.⁹

More recently, in the course of a debate over Land and Freedom, Jeff Sawtell of the Morning Star repeated the fairytale about Nin’s ‘mysterious’ disappearance and added that, while it was ‘not inconceivable’ that he had been ‘executed as a traitor’, the argument that the NKVD was responsible for Nin’s death was the product of ‘anti-Sovietism’.¹⁰ Frank Graham, a former International Brigader who reviewed Loach’s film in the New Worker, went so far as to applaud the fact that Nin was ‘executed for treason’ and that ‘several hundred members of the POUM who were secret members of the Falange suffered the same fate’.¹¹ If nothing else, this pamphlet should consign such disgraceful nonsense to the dustbin of historiography.

It would, of course, be naive to rely completely on the accuracy of Hernández’s version of events. His verbatim reconstruction of conversations which took place a decade and a half earlier, and which he can have remembered only in general terms, is clearly open to question. Hernández also had obvious reasons for exaggerating his own opposition to Moscow’s crimes in Spain – as we have seen, in his public activity during the Civil War there was no hint of any differences with the official party line. And he undoubtedly had scores to settle with former comrades like Pasionaria who denied him what he regarded as his rightful position as PCE general secretary and then threw him out of the party.

However, for those who would reject Hernández’s memoirs as the work of an embittered ex-Communist intent on slandering the movement he once led, it should be added that recent research has confirmed his account of the NKVD’s role. In 1992 two journalists from a Catalan TV station, who were preparing a documentary on Nin’s assassination, discovered in the KGB archives in Moscow two letters from Alexander Orlov, the NKVD chief in Spain. One letter, dated 23 May 1937, explained how the material linking Nin with the fascists would be fabricated; the other, dated 24 July 1937, gave details of NKVD and PCE involvement in the torture and killing of Nin. The following year John Costello and Oleg Tsarev published their book Deadly Illusions, which dealt in detail with Orlov’s career, and quoted at length from both letters.

In his letter of 23 May, Orlov informed Moscow that a genuine fascist spy ring had been uncovered and documents seized, which he proposed to use as a basis for forging evidence against the POUM. He wrote that he and his agents had ‘composed the enclosed document, which indicates the cooperation of the POUM leadership with the Spanish Falange organisation – and, through it, with Franco and Germany. We will encypher the contents of the document using Franco’s cypher, which we have at our disposal, and will write it on the reverse side of the plan of the location of our weapons emplacements in Casa del Campo which was taken from the Falangist organisation’. This message would be written in invisible ink as would a few lines added to another document. ‘A special chemical will develop these few words or lines, then we will begin to test all the other documents with this developer and thus expose the letter we have composed compromising the POUM leadership.’ The second letter, written after Nin’s murder, even identified roughly where the victim’s body lay. Nin, the newspaper El País reported, was to be found neither in Salamanca nor in Berlin. The NKVD had buried his mutilated corpse off the highway between Alcalá de Henares and Perales de Tajuña.¹²

Although Hernández’s book has been a major source for historians of the Spanish Civil War and the PCE, it has never been published in English. The sections reproduced here were serialised during 1953 in Labor Action, the US socialist paper published by Max Shachtman’s Workers Party.¹³ The translation has been checked against the Spanish text and amended. Explanatory notes have been added.

 

Robert Pitt, May 1996

 

 

NOTES

 

1. The Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) was formed in September 1935 from a fusion of two groupings. The larger of the two was the BOC (Bloque Obrero y Campesino – Workers and Peasants Bloc), led by Joaquín Maurín, which originated in the expelled Catalan Federation of the Spanish Communist Party. The other grouping, the Izquierda Comunista (Communist Left), was led by Andrés Nin and comprised the former section of Trotsky’s International Left Opposition, from which it had broken in 1933. The POUM was denounced as a Trotskyist organisation by the Spanish Communist Party, and this characterisation is repeated by Hernández. Trotsky and his supporters in fact condemned the POUM’s policies as centrist, while the POUM responded by accusing the Trotskyists of sectarianism.

2. Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain, 1978, p.34.

3. Fernando Claudín, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, 1975, pp.210-244, 693-716.

4. Andrés Nin attended the founding conference of the Red International of Labour Unions (the Comintern’s trade union movement) in 1921 as part of the delegation from the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist union federation, the CNT. He stayed on in Moscow to become assistant secretary of the RILU, and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Within the CPSU Nin supported the Left Opposition and as a result was expelled from the party in 1928. In 1930 he returned to Spain where he led the Spanish section of the International Left Opposition. In September 1936 he became minister of justice in Catalonia but was excluded from the government in December under pressure from the Stalinists.

5. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 1977, p.709.

6. Georges Soria, Trotskyism in the Service of Franco, 1938, p.23.

7. Monty Johnstone, Trotsky and World Revolution, 1976, p.12.

8. Nan Green and A.M. Elliott, Spain Against Fascism 1936-39 (Our History, No.67), 1976, p.22.

9. Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-1941, 1985, p.244.

10. Letter in the Camden New Journal, 26 October 1995.

11. New Worker, 13 October 1995.

12. Revolutionary History, Vol.4 No.4, 1993; John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, 1993, p.288. The NKVD agents who killed Nin were Orlov and ‘Juzik’, who was apparently a Brazilian named José Escoy. The Spaniards were identified only by the initials L, AF and IL, the names having been removed by the Moscow archivists. Two other Communists observed but did not participate in the torture and murder of Nin. These were the Hungarian Erno Gerö and another man named Victor.

13. I am obliged to Revolutionary History editor Al Richardson for directing me to this source.

 

 

 

 

 

HOW THE NKVD FRAMED THE POUM

 

by Jesús Hernández

 

 

WHEN I ARRIVED at the ministry, Cimorra handed me a small closed envelope.¹ Inside was a card. I read: ‘Dear friend: If you have nothing more important to do, I expect you for tea at six in the evening. I must speak to you urgently. Greetings, Rosenberg.’² I had spoken with the Soviet ambassador only a few times. Almost always I had visited him about some celebration or official reception. Now his invitation was personal and urgent.

Punctually at six I was at the embassy. ‘Go in. He’s expecting you’, one of the secretaries told me. There in the comfortable office was his excellency, the ambassador of the Soviet Union. ‘Thanks for coming’, he said, shaking hands.

‘I don’t know the reason, comrade Rosenberg. But I am at your disposal.’

‘Thanks. Have a seat. The tea will be here right away. Or do you prefer coffee?’

‘If it’s all the same I’d prefer coffee.’

Rosenberg rang a bell and ordered: ‘Coffee for the gentleman.’ He took out an expensive Russian-lacquer cigarette case with miniature engravings, and offered me a Soviet cigarette with a long cardboard tip. ‘It’s better tobacco than yours’, he said, smiling.

‘Tobacco is a matter of habit. Besides, most of our tobacco isn’t from this country, it’s Cuban’, I explained.

‘I’m expecting a friend; I’d like to you to meet him. He is very much interested in getting personally acquainted with you’, said the ambassador. At that very moment one of the secretaries announced the ‘friend’. Rosenberg rose quickly with a haste that showed his respect. The new arrival stretched out his hand to the ambassador and, turning to me, said in Spanish with a French accent: ‘Comrade Hernández?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am ... Marcos. I like the name’, he said, smiling. I was already accustomed to the fact that the ‘tovarichi’ baptised themselves with Spanish names and I attached no significance to it. Afterwards I learned that his name was Slutsky³ and that he was the chief of the Foreign Division of the GPU⁴ in Western Europe.

‘I came only a little while ago, not more than a few days ago. I hope that you will excuse me for bothering you, but – it would not be prudent for me to be seen going into your ministry or into the party headquarters. This place is more discreet. And there are so many Russians in Valencia!’⁵

‘Yes, another Russian more or less, nobody notices. And besides, I don’t believe that anyone has any interest in watching the Russians. Almost all the police are in our hands’, I said, laughing.

‘But there are agencies that the party does not control. And above all, there is the spy service, Comrade Hernández, the enemy’s spies’, he said with a certain vehemence.

Tea and coffee were served, and while the smart waiter filled the cups with delicate precision, I observed friend ‘Marcos’. He was getting close to fifty. Tall and ungainly. Drooping shoulders and a sunken chest gave him an ape-like look. His sharp-featured face was topped by a shaven head, looking from chin to crown like a vertical melon. Eyes a bit slitted and high cheek bones. ‘A true Russian’, I thought.

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, precisely about that, espionage’, he went on.

‘Well, I’m listening’, I said, with some curiosity.

‘Our foreign service has become aware that some elements of the POUM are taking steps to bring Trotsky to Spain. Do you know anything about it?’

‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

‘That shows that the Republic’s counter-intelligence services are very deficient.’

‘I don’t believe they’re deficient, except in having little interest in the escapades of the POUM.’

‘That’s what’s serious.’

‘I don’t see why.’

Our ape-like friend’s features contracted, denoting disgust. ‘If the responsible party men attach no importance to this band of counter-revolutionaries and agents of the enemy, that helps us understand many things that have happened in the war’, he said harshly.

‘In Spain Trotskyism has never awakened from sleep. And I don’t see what influence the POUM can have on the things that have been happening to us’, I replied with the intention of putting him down.

‘The POUM has units at the front’, explained Rosenberg.

‘Not all of them have to be Communist, do they?’

‘But if they aren’t Communist, we must make sure that they are not enemies’, Marcos persisted.

‘You can pose the question in that way in Russia, but in Spain nobody would take us seriously if we called the Trotskyists agents of Franco.’

‘But they are rabidly anti-Soviet! Don’t you read La Batalla?’

‘Yes, I read it. And they say a lot more about us than about Stalin. They also say a lot about the Anarchists, but that doesn’t bring me to the conclusion that our principal aim is to wrangle with them when Franco is shooting impartially at everybody.’

‘That’s an error! That’s it, that’s it!’ – and the slanting eyes of the old Chekist cast withering looks at me.

Rosenberg smoked in silence, piling up mounds of cigarette ashes in the ashtray, as if he were not present at our conversation.

‘I’m talking to you with the authority my experience has given me’, said ‘Marcos’.

‘Tell me, Marcos, why did you call me in to tell me all this, instead of explaining it personally to the secretary of our party? After all is said and done, it’s he who ought to raise these questions in the Bureau.’

‘Because I was told at the "House"⁶ that you’re a man of action, and for our work we need men who are energetic and determined.’

‘I’m grateful for their confidence, but the "man of action" in me is a thing of the past. Everyone has his period, and mine has already been and gone.’

‘Where something has been, something always remains’, threw in Rosenberg, in suave tones.

‘It isn’t a matter now of your going to plant a bomb under Prieto’s printing press. You knew, Rosenberg?’ Marcos said, turning to him with a sly smile. ‘Hernández wanted to blow up Prieto’s print shop in Bilbao.’⁷

‘At that time I wanted to do it – and even more stupid things’, I replied in disgust.

‘No, now it’s entirely a different matter. We want you to understand that it is necessary to take practical measures against Trotskyism, and help us. Your ministerial post can make the job easier for us.’

‘My ministerial post has been given me by the party, and I can go ahead only when the party orders me to act along one line or another’, I declared with asperity.

‘Marcos’ caressed his sharp-pointed chin, thinking it over. ‘Our services are performed somewhat on the fringe of the party’, he said. Rosenberg smiled imperceptibly. ‘Marcos’ looked at him fixedly. I think’, continued Marcos, ‘that you realise how much trust in you such a proposition reflects. The ‘House" gives you a mark of distinction.’

‘I don’t think it’s worth while to insist’, I cut in, ‘we’ll be wasting time.’

Marcos’s look immediately became more intense. ‘You don’t even know what it’s about’, he said.

‘No.’

‘It’s a question of getting in our hands documents which show the POUM’s contacts with the Falange⁸ and we have to act fast.’

‘If such documents exist, the procedure is to draw up the report and hand over those responsible to the courts. Once the evidence is verified, we’ll have no reason to go about it crookedly.’

‘We still have to get some more facts to make sure they don’t get away.’

‘And how can I be useful to you?’

‘For the moment, in no way. That’s our agency’s affair. But when the time comes to make certain arrests, maybe we’ll run into some difficulties with some of the authorities, and at that time your collaboration can be decisive.’

‘See me then, when you have all the evidence, and I’m ready to bring the case all the way to the cabinet itself.’

‘I knew we’d get together in the end!’ he said with visible satisfaction. And, after a pause: ‘Orlov and Bielov⁹ are working on this they’ll lay it all before you.’ And then addressing Rosenberg: ‘Have you talked to the president of the Council about this matter?’

‘About this …?’

‘I mean, the POUM in general.’

‘Yes. Many times. But Largo Caballero¹⁰ resists taking political measures against the Trotskyists.’

‘Did you tell him that this matter is of extraordinary interest to our government?’

‘I told him that Stalin himself is interested in it.’

‘And what did he answer?’

‘That as long as they act within the law, there is no reason to proceed against them, and still less to close down their premises and suspend their press; that his government is a government of the Popular Front.’

‘Popular Front, Popular Front! We’ll have to take care of it another way’, said Marcos angrily.

The Chekist rose. He stuck his hand out to me and, while we took leave, said with an air of confidence: ‘Everything will turn out just as we want.’

When he had gone, it seemed to me I observed a change in Rosenberg, something like an inner satisfaction. ‘It’s a serious matter. All these things are disagreeable, even though they’re necessary’, he said sadly. I understood that Rosenberg could not put more than that into words, but behind the words was the expression on his face. ‘This man’s reaction is something like mine’, I thought. ‘No doubt he feels aversion towards the GPU, or fears it.’

‘Friend "Marcos" is a pure-blooded Chekist’, I said jokingly. ‘Hmm’, grunted Rosenberg. I said goodbye. When he put out his hand, nobody could have supposed that this man was already sentenced to die with a bullet in the back of the head fired by one of the ‘pure-blooded’ gunmen, in the cellars of the Lubianka in Moscow. [...]

 

*

 

 

In the government Dr Negrín had assigned me two cabinet portfolios, education and health.¹¹ Prieto was minister of national defence; Zugazagoitia,¹² a Socialist, was minister of the interior; Colonel Ortega,¹³ Communist, was in charge of the General Security Administration.

Two or three days after the formation of the new government,¹⁴ I was awakened at dawn by the insistent ringing of the phone.

‘Who’s that’?’

‘Hello! It’s Ortega.’

Then:   ‘No warrants. Let them come to see me at the ministry. I expect them at ten. Salud.’

The NKVD was in operation. The ape-like figure of ‘Marcos’ came back to my memory. I recalled that he had told me: ‘Orlov and Bielov will lay it all before you’. Ortega had just told me that Orlov had shown up at the General Security Administration asking for some arrest warrants against various leaders of the POUM, without telling the ministry anything about it.

Punctually, precise as a chronometer, Orlov came to my office at ten in the morning. He was almost two metres tall, with elegant and refined manners.¹⁵ He spoke Spanish with some facility. He was not more than forty-five years old. At first glance, no one would have suspected that behind that seeming air of distinction was one of the most intransigent and sectarian NKVD operatives. He held the rank of commandant and functioned as immediate aide of ‘Marcos’, whom I had not seen again after our interview with Rosenberg at the Soviet embassy in Valencia. With the breeziness of a man who was accustomed to fear and respect, he extended his hand to me by way of greeting and took a seat with easy familiarity.

‘Comrade Hernández, you’ve delayed our work this morning’, he began, in a tone of admonishment.

‘Pardon me, my friend Orlov, but I didn’t know what was up – and I still don’t know.’

‘But you knew it was our agency that had asked for the warrants of arrest’, he said in an inquiring tone.

‘I knew you were one of those who had asked for it, but what I didn’t know was why and against whom these warrants were asked, and also why you had to by-pass the ministry.’

‘A while ago "Marcos" informed me that you understood the nature of our job and were ready to remove official difficulties for us.’

‘Marcos told me a story about espionage and I offered, if necessary, to raise the case inside the Council of Ministers. That was all.’

Orlov looked at me somewhat ironically and, all the while lighting and extinguishing a handsome cigarette lighter, he exclaimed: ‘What’s that – the government? Exactly the contrary. The government must not know a word about it until it has been finished.’

‘But what’s it about?’ I asked.

Orlov was silent for a moment. I lit a cigarette and prepared to listen.

‘Are you with our agency?’ he asked.

‘No’. Orlov made a gesture of surprise. I insisted: ‘Not now or ever.’

Orlov lit and extinguished his lighter. ‘I thought you were one of us. But no matter’, he said between his teeth. Then he began to talk.

Since a while back (he told me) he had been following the trail of a Falangist spy ring. POUM elements were mixed up with it. Hundreds of arrests had been made. The most important figure caught, an engineer named GoIfín, confessed everything. Nin was seriously compromised, Gorkin, Andrade, Gironella, Arquer, the whole Trotskyist gang.¹⁶ One Roca acted a liaison man between the POUM and the Falangists in Perpignan. A suitcase full of documents was captured in Gerona from one Riera. Also a hotel proprietor named Dalmau was convicted and confessed.¹⁷ Everything was ready to strike. I had held it up. The interior ministry must know nothing. Not even the minister himself.

‘Tell me, Orlov, why are you afraid of the ministry’s intervention?’

‘The enemy is everywhere’, he replied coldly. And then he added in explanation: ‘From the beginning we have rejected intervention by the official police.’

‘But the interior ministry can’t be unaware of an affair of such importance’, I said.

‘Zugazagoitia is a personal friend of some of those who have to be arrested’, he replied.

‘When you present all that evidence …’

‘He will do nothing’, Orlov cut me short. ‘He’s sufficiently anti-Communist.’

‘In this case, it’s a question of fighting the enemy and not of pleasing the Communists.’

‘We’d run the risk of spoiling everything’, insisted Orlov.

‘In some way or other he’ll have to be drawn in and it will always be better to prepare him for it rather than surprise him.’

‘I know what I’m talking about, Hernández.’

‘And I know what I’m doing’, I answered.

‘Now is the ideal moment to deliver an annihilating blow against this gang of counter-­revolutionaries. We have them by the throat’, he said confidently.

‘I don’t doubt that you have them by the throat, but I think this whole story will end in a big political scandal.’

Orlov looked at me with no little surprise. His lighter sparked but did not light.

‘What are you saying? That you don’t believe the story?’

‘That’s not it exactly, but it’s close to what I’m thinking’, I declared.

‘We have a mountain of evidence, crushing evidence.’

‘May I speak honestly, Orlov?’

Orlov’s face had hardened. Looking at him straight in the eyes, I hazarded the idea that was stirring in my head. ‘My impression is that all these proofs are a cleverly prepared photomontage, but I doubt whether they will stand up in evidence before a legal tribunal.’

‘We have the scale-plan which shows the military emplacements of Madrid, identified by its maker, Golfín. On this plan there is a message written in invisible ink and addressed to Franco. Do you know who this message is signed by?’ he asked me in a triumphant tone. ‘By Andrés Nin!’¹⁸

I broke into a spontaneous and natural burst of laughter. ‘What are you laughing about?’ he asked, annoyed.

‘Man, you can’t be serious! Please don’t tell such a nonsensical story out there, because people are just going to have a good laugh. In the whole country you won’t find a single citizen capable of believing that Nin is such an idiot as to write messages to Franco in invisible ink – in the era of radio.’

‘You don’t believe it?’ he asked angrily.

‘No.’

‘The you suppose it’s all a lie?’

‘All – no’, I answered coldly. ‘I think the plan exists, Golfín exists, that you have statements. I believe in everything divine and human. What I can’t believe is the simplemindedness of the message.’

‘It’s Nin’s’, he roared in a rage.

‘I don’t believe it’, I insisted, serenely.

‘You don’t believe that he is a counter-revolutionary Trotskyist, a spy, an agent of Franco?’

‘Whatever he may be, the one thing he isn’t, because I know him, is an idiot. I’ve had dealings with more or less all of them, Nin, Andrade, Gorkin, Maurín¹⁹ and the rest, and I don’t believe that they’re capable of such stupidity.’

‘But if we have mountains of papers and documents signed and sealed by the POUM!’, he shouted furiously.

‘Then I believe it even less.’

Orlov made an expression of impatience.

‘My friend Orlov’, I said, ‘let’s talk seriously. You people want to put on a big trial against the Trotskyists in Spain, as a demonstration of the reason you shot the opposition in the USSR. I know the Pravda article, of almost two months ago, in which it was announced that the "purge" begun in Spain will be carried through with the same vigour as in the Soviet Union.²⁰ So I understand your interest, perfectly. But let’s not complicate life, which is already complicated enough. If you wish, we can devote a special page in our newspapers, every day, to denounce them as a gang of enemies of the people, but let’s not stage sensational spectacles, because nobody will believe them.’

‘But if we have the proofs!’ exclaimed Orlov.

‘If I know your "apparatus", I’m aware they are able to manufacture dollars out of wrapping paper.’²¹

‘That’s an absurdity – and an impermissible opinion’, muttered Orlov, obviously angry and upset.

‘If it upsets you, then consider that I’ve said nothing’, I said ironically.

‘You have said, and you are saying, very serious things’, he said threateningly.

‘You are a specialist in matters of espionage and counter-espionage? What would you do with an agent who sent you documents of the greatest importance written on official stationery, signed with his name and, to cap it all, validated with a stamp of the GPU?’

He looked at me a bit perplexed. Rallying, he answered: ‘They don’t have our techniques or experience.’

‘Almost all of them are acquainted with illegal work and lived through the underground period of the Communist Party. If they had committed such a simple indiscretion as signing their name even on an unimportant communication we would have expelled them as provocateurs, or as imbeciles. How do you expect me to believe that in the midst of war they sign documents addressed to Franco?’

‘We have the testimony and statements of the arrested men themselves’, he replied.

‘If you managed to get these confessions, for me they have no more "legal" value, no matter how you got them, than the written, signed and sealed documents.’

‘All these documents and all these statements will go to the court trial, and there will be reason enough and evidence enough to hang all of them.’

‘In any case, I insist that the procedure be to get an order from the minister to finish this job. If I’m needed for that, I’m at your service.’

‘That way, we’ll lose everything’, he grunted in a bad temper.

‘By the way you want, there’ll only be a scandal, a scandal which will damage our party, which is already sufficiently abused.’

‘You promised to help us’, he said, indignantly.

‘I am ready’, I declared.

‘There’s no need to go on’, said Orlov. ‘I’ll talk to Jose Díaz.’²²

‘It seems to me quite proper’, I said, to irritate him, ‘that the secretary of our party should know what’s going on in Spain.’

Rising, still holding the lighter, Orlov did not see, or pretended not to see, the hand I held out to him in farewell.

With a nod of his head as sole acknowledgement, he went out, a dark expression on his face.

‘All men are equal’, I told myself, seeing him go out stiffly and elegantly. ‘At bottom and openly they despise us and try to humiliate us. They act as if they were in a conquered country and behave like lords to serfs.’ [...]

 

*

 

 

I immediately went to the private home of our party’s general secretary. I found him in bed, surrounded by a litter of medicines. His duodenal ulcer had laid him down. In a few words I informed him of my interview with Orlov. With that strong Andalusian accent of his, Díaz confided his thoughts to me in more detail than ever before. ‘I feel disgusted, disgusted at myself and everything. My faith is failing.…’ I looked at his wasted, drawn face, where moral suffering and physical pain had sunk their claws. I felt sorry for this shattered man. It was a reflection of my own self-pity.

‘I would rather have died than have to survive this spiritual death. I’ve been a man who gave himself with fanatical enthusiasm to the USSR. You know that I was a bakery worker. My revolutionary restlessness pushed me towards anarcho-syndicalism. I joined the action groups because it seemed to me that in this way I was giving more and sacrificing more for my ideals. I was always ready to die for what I believed, for what I had faith in. Later the Soviet Union, Stalin, triumphant socialism, drew me to Communism. I devoted myself with passion, without reserve, convinced that the USSR was our ideal goal. I would have sacrificed my wife, my daughter, my parents. I would have killed, assassinated, to defend Russia, to defend Stalin. And today, what? Everything crumbles, everything is in ruins at my feet. What purpose does our life have? I’ve made efforts to convince myself that I’m mistaken, understand? Because I want to believe, because I can’t admit that everything is a lie. To come to that conclusion is the end, nothingness.’

He took two pills out of a bottle and swallowed them with a sip of water. ‘When I think of all that’, he said. ‘I feel worse.’

‘Pessimism and despair won’t help us, Pepe’, I said to encourage him.

‘I know. But the reality crushes my spirit. I can’t help it. These days while I suffer in bed’, Díaz continued, ‘I’ve permitted myself to think thoroughly about our situation. The conclusion I arrived at is demoralising. The "tovarichi" boss the Political Bureau around as they please. I have a feeling that they will try to get rid of us, you and me, using any of the thousand means at their disposal. It will not be immediately, because no one – not they in the first place – is interested in provoking a crisis of leadership through differences with the method and policies of the USSR. But they will finish with us. It’s a question of time, and tactics. As for me, using my illness as their excuse, they don’t even take the trouble to keep me informed about what is taking place in the leadership. To find out what’s happening I have to call in one comrade or another, and always it’s the same: "We are doing this because Codovilla directed it, because Stepanov ordered it, because Togliatti advised it".’²³

‘It’s more than an invasion, it’s a colonisation’, I said, with an attempt at levity.

‘The Kremlin’s sepoys, that’s what we are, sepoys’, he said in anger.

‘With apologies to the sepoys!’, I said in the same tone.

‘I have gone over the whole Central Committee in my mind, and I don’t find more than half a dozen men capable of taking a firm position at our side.’

‘Far fewer’, I observed.

‘A half dozen against 300,000 members! And against the tradition. And against the prestige of the Soviet Union’, he added, disheartened.

We remained silent. The figures weighed on our hearts like lumps of lead. They crushed us. […]

‘Now let’s talk about the scheme of Orlov and Company’, Jose Díaz said with a bitter grimace. ‘What can we do about it?’

‘Little or nothing. I suppose they’ll come to see you. It’s strange they aren’t here already. What intrigues me is why they now want our collaboration when they’ve done and undone everything without taking us into account’, I pointed out.

‘Because they expect a scandal – no other reason. Phone Ortega and tell him that I am categorically opposed to any intervention in this affair without advance knowledge by the minister.’

I went to the telephone. Ortega was not in. His secretary informed me that he was with the minister. After leaving a message that Ortega was to get in touch with Díaz at his private residence. I asked the secretary if the ‘friends’ had been there. ‘About an hour ago Ortega was urgently called to the Central Committee by them’, he answered.

I hung up the receiver with the vague presentiment that we were faced with an accomplished fact. Orlov could more easily find support from the political delegation and some other members of the Political Bureau than from Jose Díaz. I communicated my fears to Díaz. He shared them.

The telephone rang a few minutes later. It was Ortega. I told him of Díaz’s order. Stammering, embarrassed, he told me he was immediately coming to see us.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Díaz.

‘What we were afraid of, I think. Ortega is coming now.’

Colonel Ortega appeared five minutes later – an honest man whom we had taken out of the front lines to take care of the General Security Administration, which was an extremely important and responsible post under war conditions. He was thin with an angular face, and kindness and openness were reflected on his thin face. This man, who had never trembled before the prospect of death when he fought in the trenches in our struggle, entered José Díaz’s house pale and uneasy. For those who did not know that we were puppets in a show, the authority of the Political Bureau was fearful. And now it was the head of the party who was questioning him with fire darting from his eyes. Ortega felt crushed.

‘A little while ago they called me to the Central Committee’, he explained. ‘Togliatti, Codovilla, Pasionaria and Checa²⁴ were there with Orlov. They ordered me to teletype to Comrade Burillo (the Assault Guard commandant who for some weeks had been acting as the head of Public Order in Barcelona)²⁵ an order for the arrest of Nin, Gorkin, Andrade, Gironella, Arquer and all other POUM elements indicated by Antonov-Ovsëenko or Stazhevsky (the first operated in Catalonia as consul and the second as commercial charge of the USSR).²⁶ The police patrols they are to use are already in Barcelona.’

A curse rang out explosively. Díaz, furious, jumped out of bed and began to dress. There was a heavy silence. Ortega looked from one of us to the other without being able to understand what had happened. He tried to justify himself: ‘I, I couldn’t suppose ... Since they ordered me ... Besides, Togliatti, Pasionaria, Checa ... I thought you agreed.’ Neither Díaz nor I said a word. Any explanation would have revealed more than he guessed, disagreement among the members of the Political Bureau themselves and our disagreements with the Soviet delegation.

Minutes afterwards, we were on the street. We took leave of Ortega, jumped into my car and headed for the headquarters of the Central Committee. A huge rambling building which occupied one side of the Plaza de Ia Congregación was the headquarters of the Political Bureau. An armed guard gave us a military salute. He rang the bell to announce the presence of the general secretary of the party. We went up to the first floor. Díaz’s personal secretary opened the door of the office for us. There, sitting before an enormous pitcher of orange drink and in his shirtsleeves, was Vittorio Codovilla, an Italian by origin and Argentine by nationality, calmly smoking a small pipe. His enormous corpulence filled the large desk – of the general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain.

On the facing wall was a big photograph of Stalin and a nice war poster of Renau. On the desk there was a mass of papers in disorder. Codovilla threw us a glance over his small eyeglasses and told us, as if addressing subordinates: ‘One moment, comrades, just a moment only – I’m finishing.’ Ignoring him, Díaz went to the telephone and ordered the operator: ‘Tell comrades Pasionaria and Checa to come down to my office immediately.’

Codovilla looked up at Díaz for a moment. Perhaps he expected or sensed the storm. Our faces could scarcely be the faces of friends. He picked up his papers and, taking out an enormous handkerchief, he began to wipe off the stream of sweat that the day’s heat had brought out on his mammoth neck. ‘Phew, isn’t it hot!’, he said. There was silence. Turning to Díaz, with the intention of justifying himself: ‘I asked for you a little while ago and they told me you were in bed. How hot it gets in my office – yours is much cooler, isn’t it?’

Pasionaria entered, followed by Pedro Checa, the party’s organisational secretary. Pasionaria theatrically went over to Diaz: ‘How good to see you here! You’re better?’ I observed her. Her smile was forced and her question was officious. Pasionaria hated Díaz. She could not forget that he had made some severe comments on her secret amorous relationship with Francisco Antón, a lad twenty years younger than she and a prototype of the unscrupulous careerist. [...] Without taking notice of the fuss that Pasionaria was making over him, Díaz answered dryly: ‘I’m perfectly well.’

Codovilla filled his pipe, pressing down the tobacco with his finger. The situation was awkward, tense. Díaz, making an effort to keep calm, asked: ‘Would you like to tell me whether I have been disqualified from doing work just because I’m ill?’ Pasionaria, with a hypocritical expression on her face: ‘You’re joking, Pepe?’

‘I’m not in a joking mood. I ask and I want a plain answer.’

‘But what are you getting at?’ Pasionaria asked again, with feigned ignorance.

‘Who ordered Ortega to send orders for the arrest of the POUM men?’ asked Díaz, going white with anger on top of his sickbed pallor.

‘We did’, said Pasionaria. ‘There couldn’t be any question of bothering you about such an unimportant thing. What importance can there be in the arrest by the police of a handful of provocateurs and spies?’ she asked malevolently.

‘The POUM arrests are not a police matter, they’re a political matter’, replied Díaz.

Codovilla smiled with an air of almost sadistic evil. Squeezing the small pipe in both hands, without losing the arrogant expression on his face, he remarked: ‘Pepe ought to take a holiday. Overwork and illness have got him excited. Reactions like this show an oversensitive state of mind. It’s perfectly understandable that the comrades didn’t want to bother you with foolishness, seeing the state of your health. The exaggerated interpretation you give such a little business shows how touchy you’ve become because of your forced withdrawal from work. In any case I agree that it is necessary to organise the work so that each day you receive a summary of what has been done and what has been decided by the comrades. But I insist: you must take a holiday. The rest will do you good.’

My eyes did not leave the hands of the cynic who pressed the smoking pipe between them. While he was speaking I thought I could interpret the real meaning of his words. It was a warning to Díaz to remove himself for a period from the work of the leadership. The Soviet delegation had begun to take precautionary measures. ‘Then I should watch out for myself’, I thought.

Since I saw Pepe’s chin trembling in agitation and irritation, I intervened lest he explode in a fit of anger and collapse in a heap. ‘If the arrests of the POUM men are unimportant, it should have been done legally, that is, by the order of the proper authority – the government. If it can be proved that they are spies, then why be afraid that Zugazagoitia would make himself an accomplice of Franco’s agents? That’s much too serious a matter for a political person to risk his prestige on it. Zugazagoitia would have neither opposed nor refused to order the arrests if any of us had brought the evidence to him. The way you’ve gone about it, it will immediately create a scandal, and justifiably so. That’s what has made Díaz angry.’

Pasionaria, looking annoyed, glanced around. Checa had been very much affected, and was biting his fingernails, as he always did when he was nervous. Codovilla answered curtly: ‘Whatever reasons the comrades of the "special agency" may have had to act as they did, it isn’t our business. Their activity takes place on the margins of the party.’

‘Very well!’ cried Díaz. ‘Let them take public responsibility for their actions and then they will have a right to do what they please. But the scandal falls on us. Their activity involves the party. And this POUM affair is very murky.’

Codovilla gave Díaz a vicious look. In a voice that sounded a bit strangled in his throat, he said: ‘The comrades of the "agency" are doing a big service for the Republic and for the party by unmasking this Counterrevolutionary rubbish. What are you complaining about?’

Defiantly and aggressively Díaz replied: ‘It seems they’re helping themselves more than us.’

‘That’s the same opinion that Hernández has and it reveals an intolerable hostility toward the comrades of the GPU’, Codovilla replied irritably.

‘It’s not true that he has any preconceived hostility towards any comrade from the "House"’, I explained. ‘Now then, if to express an opinion on this or any other matter is to be considered hostility, then what is the role of the Political Bureau? To say yes to everything? To keep quiet and obey?’

Checa, with a depressed expression, spoke hesitantly: ‘No ... I don’t believe that the situation should be confronted like this.... No, it’s not possible. We ought to unite the Political Bureau, discuss peacefully, clarify things.’

Codovilla went on spitefully: ‘We all maintain discipline and obe