The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

17 Eden, Facing the Dictators, pp. 415 and 408.

18 Bowers, Mission in Spain.

CHAPTER 15: The Soviet Union and the Spanish Republic

1 The PSUC in Catalonia increased during this period of a year from 5,000 members to 45,000 and the Communist Party of Euskadi from 3,000 to 22,000, which made an approximate total of 300,000, more than the PSOE and all the republican parties together. According to José Díaz, the breakdown was as follows:

industrial workers (including engineers and technicians): 87,660

agricultural workers: 62,250

landowning peasants: 76,700

middle class: 15,485

intellectuals: 7,045

women: 19,300

Total: 268 440

It is significant that the communists attracted more landowning peasants than agricultural workers (Joan Estruch, Historia oculta del PCE, Madrid, 2000, pp. 132–5.

2 Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas. La Internacional Comunista y España, 1919–1939, Barcelona, 1999, p. 305.

3 Ivo Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003, pp. 28 and 32.

4 The main works on the subject, making use of the former Soviet archives since 1992, include: R. Radosh, M. R. Habeck and G. Sevostiano (eds), Spain Betrayed, The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, Yale, 2001; Yury Rybalkin, Operatsiya ‘X’: Sovetskaya voennaya pomoshch respublikanskoi ispanii (1936–1939), Moscow, 2000; Daniel Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética y la guerra civil española. Una revisión crítica, Barcelona, 2003; Gerald Howson, Armas para España. La historia no contada de la guerra civil española, Barcelona 2000; Michael Seidman, A ras de suelo. Historia social de la República durante la guerra civil, Madrid, 2003; A. Elorza and M. Bizcarrondo, Queridos camaradas. La Internacional Comunista y España, 1919–1939, Barcelona, 1999; and of course the archives themselves have shed further light: principally, the RGVA, RGASPI and GARF.

5 Kowalsky, pp. 73–4.

6 Orlov was a nom de guerre. His NKVD name was Lev Lazarovich Nikolsky, but his real name was Felbin, Leiba Lazarovich. Most Jews who joined the NKVD were ordered to take less recognizably Jewish names (GARF R-9401/12/55, pp. 211–12).

7 From the papers of S. P. Litvinov, the radio operator for the IntelligenceDepartment of the Red Army and then the chief of radio communications at the Republican Tank Brigade under the command of D. G. Pavlov (Yury Rybalkin, Operatsiya‘X’, p. 39).

8 See Kowalsky, pp. 42ff.

9 Exact figures from Soviet files are hard to establish with all the conflicting sources, but in general terms the total war mate´riel supplied consisted of between 623 and 648 aircraft; between 331 and 347 tanks; between 714 and 1,228 field guns; between 338,000 and 498,000 rifles. See Howson, pp. 382–418 and Kowalsky, pp. 214–16. The Soviet Union sent six basic types of aircraft: the Polikarpov I-15 biplane fighter known in Spain as the Chato and the I-16 monoplane fighter known as the Mosca by the republicans and the Rata by the nationalists; the Tupolev SB-2 bomber known as the Katiuska and the light bomber cum reconnaissance aircraft, the Polikarpov R-5.

10 Howson, p. 181.

11 RGVA 35082/1/185, p. 352.

12 See ángel Viñas, El oro de Moscú, Barcelona, 1979 and Guerra, dinero, dictadura, Barcelona, 1984; and also Pablo Martín Aceña, El oro de Moscú y el oro de Berlin, Madrid, 2001.

13 Gabriel Jackson, however, argues that the idea of sending the gold to Moscow took the Soviet authorities by surprise and that Négrin had to explain the idea in detail to Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador (Juan Negrín, p. 75).

14 Its value was 598 million gold pesetas, the equivalent of $195 million (Viñas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura, p. 170).

15 GARF 7733/36/27, pp. 25–6.

16 Viñas, El oro de Moscú, pp. 289–92. These figures do not, however, take into account the numismatic value of many of the coins, which was considerable in the case of old Spanish and Portuguese pieces.