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

On 13 September 1936 the council of ministers authorized Negrínto transfer the remaining gold and silver from the Banco de España to Moscow. Two days later 10,000 crates full of precious metal left the Atocha station and reached the magazines of La Algameca in the port of Cartagena on 17 September. Another 2,200 cases, were sent to Marseilles and the rest, 7,800 cases, was shipped to Moscow via Odessa. This consignment was accompanied by NKVD personnel and guarded by a detachment of carabineros. On reaching Odessa the 173rd NKVD Rifle Regiment took over guard duties.¹⁵ These 510 tons of precious metals were worth at least $518 million at 1936 values.¹⁶ One of the first bills the Republic had to pay with the gold amounted to $51,160,168. It was for the ‘fraternal military support’ already provided.¹⁷ It is very hard to judge the Soviet method of accounting when they calculated what the Republic owed for arms and other expenses, such as shipping and the training of republican troops and specialists. Nothing was free and many charges appear to have been exaggerated to say the least. The Soviet Union claimed that with the credits it provided in 1938 (after the current account in gold had been exhausted, according to their calculations), the Republic had received $661 million worth of goods and services, yet only $518 million in gold had been sent to Moscow. But the Soviet figure does not reveal the creative accounting which took place when changing gold into roubles, and roubles into dollars, and dollars into pesetas. At a time when the rouble–dollar exchange rate was fixed at 5.3:1, the Soviet Union was using the figure of 2.5:1, a difference which netted it a very considerable profit.

When news leaked out of the transfer of the gold reserves to Paris and Moscow, the value of the republican peseta collapsed on the foreign exchanges, falling by half between November and December. The cost of imports became a terrible burden for an already battered economy and the cost of living shot up.¹⁸

Negrín’s role at this time was important for future developments. While organizing the despatch of the gold to Moscow, he became extremely close to Stashevsky, a Pole sent by Moscow as the Soviet economic attaché. Stashevsky immediately recognized that Negrín was more than just somebody the Soviet Union could trust. Negrín believed fervently in the centralization of political power and that also meant economic power. ‘Our opinion’, Stashevsky reported to Moscow, ‘is that everything possible has to be done to support the concentration of all the exports and imports–i.e. all foreign currency operations–in the same hands.’¹⁹

Both Negrín and Stashevsky were furious with the Generalitat and the anarchists in Catalonia for taking financial affairs into their own hands. ‘Catalonians are seizing without any control hundreds of millions of pesetas from the branch of the Banco de España,’ Stashevsky reported to Moscow.²⁰ In their view the fact that the central government had done nothing to help Catalan industry was irrelevant. They also hated the Soviet consul-general in Barcelona, Antonov-Ovseyenko, who clearly sympathized with Companys and got on well with the anarchist leader García Oliver. ‘García Oliver does not object to the unified leadership or to discipline in battle,’ Antonov-Ovseyenko recorded, ‘but he is against the restoration of the permanent status of officers, this foundation of militarism. It is with obvious pleasure that he listens to me when I express agreement with his military plan.’²¹