Titans of History

In the last decade of his life Bulgakov, increasingly ill and disillusioned, had two lifelines. The first was Stalin, who saved Bulgakov from total destitution while at the same time stifling his career. Stalin recognized Bulgakov’s brilliance as much as his political unreliability; if he had known that Bulgakov was writing The Master and Margarita in secrecy, he would have had him liquidated. After a sinister yet encouraging personal phone call from the tyrant to Bulgakov, his favorite play became part of the Moscow Arts Theater’s repertoire: Stalin secured him a position as assistant director. Bulgakov’s second lifeline was his third wife, Yelena Sergeyevna, the model for Margarita, whose unconditional love sustains and saves the persecuted Master. Yelena ensured the survival of Bulgakov’s masterpiece, safeguarding the manuscript until its publication just before her death in 1970.

Bulgakov was not a dissident as such: he survived in Stalinist Russia in order to write. He was in this sense an ordinary writer, not a political campaigner. Like the other creative geniuses of Stalinist Russia—the poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, the poet-novelist Boris Pasternak (author of Dr. Zhivago), the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the novelist Vasily Grossman (author of Life and Fate, another work that survived to undermine tyranny)—he made his compromises with the system in order to survive (though Mandelstam was finally crushed after his scabrous poetic attack on Stalin himself). Indeed, he wrote the play Batumi about Stalin’s youthful exploits to celebrate the dictator’s 60th birthday in 1939. When Stalin rejected the play, Bulgakov’s health collapsed and he died soon afterward. Stalin himself boasted “we even got Bulgakov to work for us.”

Many other writers were killed by Stalin, yet as Bulgakov famously wrote: “Manuscripts don’t burn!”

FRANCO

1892–1975

I am responsible only to God and history.

General Franco

General Francisco Franco, the generalissimo of Spain from 1939 to 1975, is in some ways the forgotten tyrant, his deeds overshadowed by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, yet he was truly one of history’s monsters. In the 1930s, this fascistic warlord won power with brutality and terror in a savage civil war, aided by his ally Hitler, and proceeded to terrorize the civilian population of Spain for twenty-five years. As democracy thrived in the rest of western Europe following the Second World War, his brutal military dictatorship continued to crush dissent, and to shoot and torture his supposed enemies.

Franco was born in northwest Spain in 1892, in the naval city of Ferrol. His mother was a pious and conservative upper-middle-class Catholic; his father a difficult and eccentric man who expected his son to follow him into the navy. Due to naval cutbacks, however, at just fourteen years old, Franco entered the army instead. Fiercely professional, he soon carved out his reputation as a brave and driven soldier, becoming a captain in 1916 and the youngest general in Spain in 1926, at age thirty-four.

Although staunchly loyal to the monarchy, Franco was not overtly involved in politics until 1931, when the Spanish king abdicated, leaving the government in the hands of left-wing republicans. When the conservatives won power back two years later, they identified Franco as a powerful potential ally and promoted him to major general, instructing him to suppress an uprising by Asturian miners in October 1934. Election victory for the left-wing Popular Front in 1936, however, saw Franco effectively demoted and sent to the Canary Islands, but just months later the right-wing Spanish nationalist bloc called on the army to join them in rebellion against the government, which had failed to stabilize the country. The Spanish Civil War had begun.

In a radio broadcast from the Canary Islands in July 1936, Franco declared he would join the rebels with immediate effect and, after mixed fortunes for Nationalist forces in Morocco and Madrid, he was declared generalissimo, effectively the leader of the Nationalist cause during the three years of war that followed.

Franco’s wartime campaign was notorious for his indiscriminate brutalizing of civilian populations, aided on occasions by German and Italian fascist governments. Franco organized a White Terror in which 200,000 people were murdered. The most infamous atrocity was the 1937 market-day bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the German Condor Legion. Though it was not a military target and had no air defenses, the Luftwaffe pounded the town throughout the day and swooped over outgoing roads to mow down fleeing civilians as the town was engulfed in a fireball. An estimated 1654 people were slaughtered.