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

Since the 1920s the Soviet presence in Spain had increased, mainly in the form of cultural propaganda. The Comintern had done no more than it had in other Western countries: infiltrate and wait. On receiving news of the coup d’état of 18 July 1936, the Comintern had gathered as much information as possible from its principal agents, especially the Argentinian Vittorio Codovilla, who had been the Spanish Communist Party’s controller since 1932, while the Soviet authorities considered their position. Stalin, as we have seen, did not come to a decision to intervene until September, two months after the rising. Only then did the Soviet regime consider the possibilities of exploiting the conflict and gaining domestic and international support. The Politburo in Moscow ordered huge demonstrations to be organized while the Comintern initiated an international campaign. Soviet citizens contributed 274 million roubles (approximately £11,416,000) for humanitarian purposes in republican Spain.⁵

The Soviet government sent Mikhail Koltsov, the most famous Pravda correspondent, to Spain, followed by two film-makers, Roman Karmen and Boris Makaseev. Three weeks after their arrival newsreels from the Spanish front were being screened in Moscow cinemas and articles were published almost on a daily basis in the Soviet press. On 21 August the Soviet government appointed Marcel Rosenberg ambassador in Madrid, and a month later the old bolshevik who led the assault on the Winter Palace, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, as consul general in Barcelona. In the meantime Ilya Ehrenburg, the correspondent of Izvestia, kept Rosenberg informed on the conflict of Catalan politics and Companys’s complaints against the central government. The Politburo also appointed Jacob Gaikis to the embassy secretariat and Artur Stashevsky as commercial attaché.

Among the military advisers were General Jan Berzin (‘Grishin’), Vladimir E. Gorev (‘Sancho’) as military attaché, Nikolai Kuznetsov (‘Kolya’) as naval attaché and Yakov Smushkevich (‘Duglas’) as air force adviser. The majority of the senior military men in Spain were from Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. The Soviet embassy was set up in the Hotel Palace until eight weeks later when it followed the government to Valencia. The Comintern sent its own team, with Palmiro Togliatti (‘Ercole’ or ‘Alfredo’), the leader of the Italian Communist Party in exile and one of the chief influences on Comintern decision making. He later became the main adviser to the Spanish Communist Party. The Hungarian Erno Gerö (‘Pedro’) performed a similar role with the PSUC in Barcelona. The most terrifying adviser to come to Spain was Aleksander Orlov, the representative of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, who was to take charge of the secret police.⁶

At first, the French Communist Party and its leaders provided the main source of communication for the Comintern’s directives. Soon, communications on arms shipments, reports from GRU officers and Soviet military advisers were radioed either in the morning or in the evening direct to a transmitter in the Sparrow Hills next to what is now Moscow University.⁷

The government of Largo Caballero approved on 16 September the establishment of an embassy in Moscow. Five days later the socialist doctor Marcelino Pascua, who spoke Russian and had visited the Soviet Union to study public health, was named ambassador. Dr Pascua was received in Moscow with great ceremony and deference, and allowed access to Stalin. On the other hand the republican government did nothing to make Pascua’s task easy.⁸

The Soviet authorities knew from their intelligence service, the NKVD, and from Comintern representatives of the critical situation in which the Republic found itself towards the end of August. The secretary general of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, presented a report on 16 September to the Comintern outlining the Republic’s lack of a regular army and chain of command. On 22 September Codovilla called for ‘arms above everything else’. As a result, Soviet military intelligence prepared a contingency plan for military assistance and the organization of a GRU group to carry it out. It was completed on 24 September and bore the codename Operation ‘X’. Kliment Voroshilov, the minister of defence and an old crony of Stalin’s from the Russian civil war, informed the Kremlin ten days later that the sale had been prepared for 80 to 100 T-26 tanks, based on a Vickers model, and 50 to 60 fighters. Stalin gave his approval.⁹