The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston
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and of the Soviet advisers, since Russian aid in terms of tanks, aircraft, the International Brigades and technical expertise had started to arrive over the previous weeks. How much detail, other than airy references to ‘controlling the fifth column’, Miaja received is impossible to say. The implementation of the operational decisions also required, and would get, assistance from the anarchist movement.
Thus the authorization, the organization and the implementation of what happened to the prisoners involved many people. However, Carrillo’s position as Public Order Councillor, together with his later prominence as secretary general of the Communist Party, saw him accused of sole responsibility for the deaths that followed. That is absurd, but it does not mean that he had no responsibility at all. The calibration of the degree of that responsibility must start with the question of why the twenty-one-year-old leader of the Socialist Youth was given such a crucial and powerful position. Late on the night of 6 November, after the meeting with Miaja, Carrillo, along with Serrano Poncela, Cazorla and others, was formally incorporated into the Communist Party. They were not subjected to stringent membership requirements. In what was hardly a formal ceremony, they simply informed José Díaz and Pedro Checa of their wish to join and were incorporated into the Party on the spot. The brevity of the proceedings confirms that Carrillo was already an important Communist ‘submarine’ within the Socialist Party. After all, he had brought into the PCE’s orbit the 50,000 members of the FJS and the further 100,000 who had subsequently joined the JSU. He was already attending meetings of the PCE’s politburo, its small executive committee, which indicated that he was held in high esteem. He had long since been identified by Comintern agents as a candidate for recruitment. If he had not publicly made the switch before, it was because of his, and presumably their, hope that he could help bring about the unification of the PSOE and the PCE. Largo Caballero’s determined opposition to unity combined with his poor direction of the war effort had made this seem a futile aspiration. Moreover, the prestige accruing to the Communist Party from Soviet aid suggested that there was little advantage in delaying the leap. It was an eminently practical decision, although Fernando Claudín argued implausibly that Carrillo was brave to sever his links with a party within which he was so prominently placed.71
Oddly, Carrillo claimed that his membership of the PCE was not public knowledge as late as July 1937.72 Certainly, in late December 1936 in Valencia, Carrillo, Cazorla, Melchor and Serrano Poncela had all informed Largo Caballero of what they had done. The ‘boss’ was devastated, as were others in his entourage. It finally dawned on him that he had let the future of the PSOE slip into the hands of the Communists. According to Carrillo, he said with tears in his eyes, ‘As of now, I no longer believe in the Spanish revolution.’73 Not long afterwards, he said of Carrillo to a close collaborator, perhaps Amaro del Rosal, ‘He was more than a son to me. I shall never forgive the Communists for stealing him from me.’74 Largo Caballero’s later reflections were altogether more vitriolic. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote, ‘In the Socialist Youth, there were Judases like Santiago Carrillo and others who managed to simulate a fusion which they called the JSU. Later, they revealed their treachery when they joined the Communist International.’75
Carlos de Baraibar, who had replaced Carrillo as the old leader’s favourite, recalled sarcastically that:
a group of leaders of the JSU visited me to let me know that they had decided en masse to join the Communist Party. I knew nothing about it, but they made their case so eloquently that I was left with the impression that their lives had been rendered so impossible within the Socialist movement that, to be able to go on fighting effectively for the cause, the poor creatures had had no alternative but to join the Communists. Nevertheless, it seemed to me monstrous that this had been done without them consulting with senior comrades other than, as I later discovered, Álvarez del Vayo. They had been advised throughout by the man we called ‘the eye of Moscow’, the secret representative of the Comintern or rather of Stalin.
Largo Caballero also referred to ‘Medina’/Codovila as ‘el ojo de Moscú’.76
When Serrano Poncela began to run the Public Order Delegation, in the early hours of 7 November, he used written orders for the evacuation of prisoners left by the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, before leaving Madrid for Valencia.77 The Norwegian Consul, the German Felix Schlayer, claimed that the preparation of the necessary document was the price paid by Muñoz to Communist militiamen who were preventing him joining the rest of the government in Valencia.78 Evacuation orders were not the equivalent of specific instructions for murder – as was shown by the safe arrival of some evacuated prisoners at their destinations. Whoever signed the orders, in the midst of administrative collapse and widespread popular panic, the evacuation of 8,000 prisoners seemed impossible. Nevertheless, Carrillo’s Public Order Council would undertake the task.79
Among those pushing for the evacuation of the prisoners were the senior Republican military authorities in the capital, General Miaja and his chief of staff, Vicente Rojo, the senior Russians present in Madrid and the Communist hierarchy. Given the crucial military assistance being provided by the Soviet personnel, and their own experience of the siege of St Petersburg in the Russian Civil War, it was natural that their advice should be sought. The most senior of the Soviet military personnel were Generals Ian Antonovich Berzin, the overall head of the Soviet military mission, and Vladimir Gorev. Berzin, along with Soviet diplomats, had gone to Valencia with the government, while Gorev, officially the military attaché but actually Madrid station chief of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), remained. Gorev would thus play a crucial role, alongside Rojo, in the defence of Madrid. Also involved were Mikhail Koltsov, the Pravda correspondent, perhaps the most powerful Russian journalist of the day, and Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the acting NKVD station chief in Madrid who went by the name Aleksandr Orlov. In fact, according to the principal expert on Soviet security services in Spain, Orlov was away from Madrid from 13 October to 10 November in Cartagena.80 However, his subordinate, Josif Grigulevich, was his liaison with Carrillo. They became active collaborators and friends. Grigulevich would certainly have transmitted to Carrillo the Russian view that the captive military officers who had refused to fight for the Republic should simply be liquidated.
Other influential figures in the defence of Madrid were the senior Comintern personnel, Codovila and the Italian Vittorio Vidali. Known by his pseudonym of ‘Carlos Contreras’, Vidali had been instrumental in the founding of the Fifth Regiment, from which the Republic’s Popular Army evolved. He was the Fifth Regiment’s political commissar, and his conviction that rebel supporters within Madrid should be eliminated was reflected in his vehement articles and speeches. Conscious that the prisoners were already boasting that they would soon join their rebel comrades, Gorev and other Soviet advisers, including Vidali, insisted that it would be suicidal not to evacuate them. As the rebel siege tightened, Vicente Rojo and Miaja fully concurred.81
Miaja soon established a close relationship with Carrillo’s deputy, José Cazorla, one of the key players in the organization of the fate of the prisoners.82 Taciturn and efficient, Cazorla believed that rebel supporters had to be eliminated. To carry out this task, as will be seen, he frequently relied on the advice of Russian security personnel. As concerned as Miaja about the prisoners was the forty-two-year-old Vicente Rojo, recently promoted lieutenant colonel. Rojo believed that the fifth column was made up of spies, saboteurs and agitators and feared that they could play a decisive role in the fate of the capital. Accordingly, he wrote, the military authorities had to take the decision to eliminate it.83
The public order set-up of the Junta de Defensa under the command of Santiago Carrillo answered to Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije, and it is clear that they