The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 16: World War II

The Imperialist Encirclement

There had never been any doubt in the minds of our Bolshevik leaders they would eventually have to fight another great conflict. Lenin’s doctrine of keeping the capitalist countries divided (formally begun with the 1922 Rapallo Treaty) could not last forever. But, if it were to last long enough to allow us Bolsheviks to prepare for the great conflict, in whatever ways were available, then that would be good enough.

It was the most basic Marxist science that the class struggle had to be played out internationally as well as nationally. We were, after all, after them.  We were devoted to our last breath and first aspiration to the liquidation of the capitalist class worldwide. Likewise they were devoted to our destruction. There would not be, nor could there be, according to our historical science (that is to say our historical materialist theory of social and cultural evolution), anything other than a final climactic class-war planet-wide. From 1924 to 1941, as it turned out, we had only seventeen years to jockey for the best position from which to fight that final battle or battles.

Our northern frontier was protected by the Red Army and Navy and the then solid ice pack that existed through much of the year restricting imperialist naval thrusts. Our southern frontier was protected by the Himalayas and deserts and backward areas such as Persia, Afghanistan and northwest China which imperialism would find it difficult if not impossible to utilize for a broad attack on us. Thus our problems were East and West. East against Japan and the USA and West against Germany, Italy, Great Britain, France and the lesser fascist countries of Iberia and East Europe. We will begin with the Western Front.

The Western Front

Along the way, from Rapallo (1922) to June of 1941, there were numerous conflicts between the Soviet Republic (after 1924 the Soviet Union) and the rest of the capitalist world. Perhaps the most difficult was the opening shot of World War II, that of Spain (1936-1939). Not because of the military complexity of the armed struggle, for that was none too unusual. But, for the international political gamesmanship of the 1930's, where the capitalist classes of France and England were busy trying to “pacify” Hitler (which is to say busy encouraging Hitler to turn his attention to his oft stated goal of war with us - the USSR) and trying to provoke the Soviet Union into one or another, seemingly transparent, traps. Traps that would have the effect of making it easier for their Governments to appease Hitler and turn against Stalin and the rest of us also. – And to attack us together!

This de facto imperialist conspiracy was the entire substance and foreign office focus of British and French ruling class policy from 1926 until the actual turn of the coming World War in 1941. As a matter of interest I once heard (Portland Oregon 1963) Hyman Lumer (CPUSA leading member) lecture on this subject and one important point I recall was his opinion that FDR was “at best neutral and at worst pro-fascist, that is from 1933-1941,… but as time progressed FDR tended toward neutrality and then outright hostility to European fascism.” Subsequently I spent over forty years following the information flow and have been able to confirm this thesis beyond any reasonable doubt. I think Stalin was sensitive to this evolution of FDR and the New Deal and this sensitivity provides an understanding of the reason for Stalin’s decision in the early phases of the Spanish Civil War to pull Orlov out of Spain and send him to New York. More at Eleven.

After the events of 1933 and 1934 in Germany and Russia the Soviet Party authorized a step up in war industry and a restoration of command ranks of the old Czarist variety in the Army. In 1935 names given during the Civil War to the officer and NCO ranks reverted to the traditional rank titles as the USSR prepared for war, the officers and NCOs being rewarded accordingly. A new highest rank of Marshall of the Soviet Union (equivalent to a US five star general) was created and five four-star generals received the honor.

The Chinese had been fighting fascism since 1927 as we have seen but for us communists in the USA it was in Spain we first confronted modern fascism. For the Soviet Union too Spain would be where world socialism and our armed forces first tested our instruments of war against theirs. World War II began, in reality, in Spain, in July (on the 17th) 1936 although we Bolsheviks would not be in that war formally for another five years. That is, until June 22nd, 1941. Let us take a closer look.

The Spanish Civil War (July 17, 1936 – April 1, 1939)

The Spanish Kingdoms of Isabel and Fernando (Castile and Aragon) emerged from the 1492 discovery of the New World and the nearly simultaneous discovery by Portuguese explorers of the Muslim circumventing Cape of Good Hope (tip of South Africa) route to the South Asian and Far Eastern parts of the Old World, having put a permanent mark on Spain’s subsequent sociocultural evolution (and that of Portugal too, of course.) Namely by creating national enterprises bent on “looting” as opposed to “producing” (commodities) to acquire wealth. By stealing the gold, silver, and slave labor of the Americas, tremendous quantities of capital were accumulated in the hands of the feudal ruling classes of Spain and Portugal.

Isabel: The Boss

Isabel wore the pants (literally) in the Fernando relationship. She was not some kind of sheltered fairy-tale princess. She put together the army that conquered Moslem Spain and the secret police force keeping her and Fernando in power as Queen and King of Castile and Aragon and their newly emerging Spanish Kingdom. In the process she expelled the Islamists and the Jews. She appeared, frequently at the head of her army, mounted, in leather from head to toe, booted, in tailored Spanish steel armor. What Isabel wanted Isabel got. Just to be sure, she had her always present guardian force (the Hermanidad) of privileged thugs who became her Praetorian Guard, and secret police, to see her will was made so.

The Global ideological agent of Isabel, (the Pope of Rome, Alexander VI), the former Archbishop Borgia, Isabel’s lover and sycophant, declared the world divisible between two Papist powers, Spain and Portugal. The Pope drew a line for Isabel dividing the entire world. He was giving virtually the entire Western Hemisphere to Spain and everything east of the line to Portugal. – And, so the world was divided effectively for two centuries as far as the bosses of Europe were concerned. But the point is the two “superpowers” of Europe (Spain and Portugal) were bent on looting hard gold and silver not on manufacturing commodities.

Needless to say Isabel’s suborning of the Papist authority to the monopoly on enslavement and exploitation of the New World leaving Britain and northern Europe out of the picture altogether was a de facto declaration of war against emerging protestant Europe. This became a war between the Papal superpowers against England and northern Europe. Spain against the rest of Europe, especially the Netherlands and England, countries it wanted anyway, for their capitalist component. Thus in the 1500’s, Anglo-Protestant Europe was continuously in a subrosa Cold War of sorts (as in the movie Elizabeth, The Golden Age) Nonetheless, the intercontinental conflict was deadly as the Iberian New World colonies would testify, raid after raid .

In 1588 the Spanish royal family-nobility oligarchy made a fateful final error and suffered massive naval defeat in its attempt to invade and occupy Great Britain. Not only would the victors have redivided all of the land and wealth but done so with the stated objective of destroying protestant power in England and bringing Elizabeth to Rome for a public burning. The Spanish failed, learning in the process that Captains of FedEx shipments of stolen New World gold and Manila Galleons filled with far-eastern riches were not automatically qualified to be Captains of war vessels. With a little help from her friends (the weather) the limey’s managed to fight off the invasion and drive it to self-destruction against its North Sea escape route.

At any rate, the Iberian road to riches, stood and stands in direct contrast to the British way which involved producing commodities for sale at home and abroad – which is to say the British, being locked out of the Western Hemisphere territories of Spain by their military inability to challenge the Spanish Monarchs, had to go the capitalist route like it or not (and in those days the capitalist route was far less profitable). Supplemented along the way with a lot of piracy (buccaneering) or if you prefer “privateering” in the Caribbean, as well as exploration with a view to colonization of the Indian subcontinent.

(For an entertaining view of this early Caribbean period I recommend the Geena Davis 1995 movie Cutthroat Island (based loosely on the adventures of several female pirates of some renown and one socialist pirate who ended up in Madagascar) which gives an entertaining and technically correct view of the British New World in 1668 which was only the Caribbean and New England. For an excellent view of the latter part of this four hundred year period (~1810) I recommend the A&E series Horatio Hornblower. The more recent Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander, Far Side of the World) illustrates the condition of terminal feudalism/early capitalism in Europe (Napoleonic wars).

However, unbeknownst even to themselves, in the long run the British (and the French) were on the far better road to super profit creation via capitalism and the Spanish were not. All of this history had to catch up with the Spanish, and it did; but it took four hundred years! Even so it is an interesting dialectical conundrum, for while the Spanish path aimed as it was at avoiding class antagonisms known to be associated in the rest of Western Europe with capitalism of the industrial variety which might have generated a fatal weakness in their system in the short run, it was simultaneously weakening Spain vis a vis England and France, in the long run

As the nature of West European and North American economy began to shift to manufacturing, even ever so marginally at first, the shift was simultaneously being made into whose hands actual cash and commodities were accumulating. No longer was the ruling class source of wealth the farmers held in servitude as serfs (or slaves in Eastern Europe) but the workers paid by the hour and thus the capitalists were without the additional burden of having to feed and house their labor force, which if held in absolute servitude would have to be fed and housed all year round. (Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations notes this fact on page one, pointing out that the capitalist route was a much more economical one – which is still why capitalist wage slavery is the normative preference over master-slave stage, chattel slavery.) Now the owner of the means of production simply dismissed labor when no longer needed and those thus dismissed were on their own. Serfs and slaves have to be fed and housed all year round by their masters and mistresses; workers for wages were (and are) fucked after working hours. Freedom is not free.

Thus over a period of several centuries the hand of the manufacturing and financial bourgeoisie grew until they became the determining factor in Anglo-American politics rather than the class whose policies, (the Spanish in the New World or the Portuguese in the Old) were leaving their profiteers far behind. James Cavell’s book Shogun illustrates perfectly the role played by British privateers in breaking the Portuguese-CatholicChurch control of European trade with Japan and China. As such I consider this a good introduction to the National Geographic’s World’s Toughest Prisons series (See the show on Santa Marta, Mexico and Lurigancho, Peru.) Cavell’s East Asia series is essential reading for those of us who have not had personal experience in the Far East (such as myself.)

Note: Clavell spent World War II interned in a Japanese prison camp outside Singapore called Changi. These experiences later provided the basis for his first book King Rat. Changi was very much like the gringo sponsored (and financed) prison in Peru called the Lurigancho Center for Social Re-adaptation in Lima, about which I have written two books concerning my own experiences (Rivers of Blood, High Finance South American Style.) What I left behind is shown several decades later in the National Geographic Channel show on Lurigancho.

Thanks but No Thanks!

Furthermore in those four centuries (1518 to 1921) the feudal ruling classes considered Spanish industrialization at home in the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon to be completely out of the question. They knew if they allowed the emergence of mercantile capitalists possessing commodities often created by proto-machinofacture and its essential use of labor-power as the source of all wealth in these factories, they would also be creating their own grave diggers! (1) That is, the creation of an industrial proletariat would be terribly destabilizing. Industrial workers being far more difficult to control than landless agricultural workers. (2) Furthermore, and at that time most importantly, some of the small bourgeoisie would become big bourgeoisie quickly and many of them would be financially very well off. Inevitably this would mean the King and his Court, not to mention the nobility, would soon come under their sway (become their lenders and bankers) as their class aristocrat brothers had in every other European country. Thus, the Iberian monarchs decided for industry they might have to have, and for the profits that came from the creation of capitalist proto-commodities, they would grab as grab can in the rest of Western Europe, thereby achieving this objective. Or not, (e.g., see the movie Elizabeth, the Golden Age.)

We’ll Take Capitalism Our Way, Thank You

This is why, in the 1500’s, Spain took military aim at the Netherlands and England. – And in a more sophisticated way Isabel took aim at the workshops of Italy, installing her lover (bribing the voting cardinals), the infamous Archbishop Borgia, as Pope of Rome (changing his name to Alexander VI). Meanwhile Spain’s resources were devoted to the tiny ruling class behind these monarchs – which is to say their luxurious life styles – and to the construction of a powerful naval force to control these new global provinces. By placing capitalism in its true form outside the boundaries of Castile and Aragon the Spanish feudalist rulers secured the labor and social peace they wanted at home, and for a long time.

 No need for public education here (beyond the guilds necessary to construct powerful Manila Galleons), so the early start the Spaniards had made in terms of education was reversed. The reversal lasted nearly four centuries and featured a steady decline in public education including higher education where 60 odd universities were reduced to fifteen and more and more lower grade education handed to the religious authorities of Roman Catholicism (so so-called public education in Iberia resembled so-called public education in the contemporary Islamic world).

For the powers that be – the ruling aristocrats and their nobility – it was a system which had worked very well. If it had not been for the US declaration of war against them in 1898, as far as they were concerned (and like our contemporary imperialists they were ignorant and blind to history) the Old Regime could have gone on forever.

Spain Forced Into the 20th Century

However, it was the war of 1898 against the North Americans which brought a new day to the Iberian Peninsula – at least in the Spanish part of it. The gringos wanted the Spanish Road into China and it was this they got when they defeated the pitiful naval squadrons of the Spanish and seized the Philippines. (The Cuban part of this Spanish-American War was just an excuse and gringo intervention there had to happen that year unless the gringos were ready to let Cuba win its independence on its own merits, given the advances of the Cuban revolutionary forces of Jose Marti.) The Philippines had been the major road into China for Europeans for all of these four centuries and at one time in the 1500’s and 1600’s the only road. The gringos wanted it, knew they could seize it, and proceeded to do so. Again, for fascinating insights into the status of Europe with the Far East in 1600 read James Cavell’s Shogun.

The Philippines

The loss of the colonies – especially the Philippines - to the US meant large numbers of de facto expelled overseas Spanish expatriate capitalists would make their way back to their homeland, bringing with them the technology of capitalism they had been using to create profits overseas. So in the early 1900’s the arrival of Spain’s foreign expatriate capitalists and their New Class technocrats doomed the old order.

Twenty Years Later

But the Old Regime would not go quietly so Spain became the center in the 1920’s of an intense intra-bourgeoisie struggle and an intra-feudal classes struggle. These struggles were intense precisely because the newcomers would not wait. Too many years had gone by already! The idea of “waiting” was dead on arrival. The newcomers wanted modern government and modern property concepts to go along with their technology and would not take no or “later” for an answer. Practically, realistically, how could they take “no” or “later” for an answer when their entire way of making money (earning a living) depended on industrial manufacturing? Consequently, the returning expatriate capitalists had been linking up with like-minded Spaniards at home. The feudalist Monarchy would have to give way to a capitalist Parliamentary system where the bourgeoisie could settle their differences among themselves.

These struggles were being exacerbated simultaneously by an increasingly aggressive working class movement in the towns and cities and in the countryside. What would happen?

Beginning in 1931 with the election of a Parliament and the abdication of the King, Spain began a downward spiral toward civil war that climaxed on July 17, 1936. The date of the revolt of Spanish fascist Army officers against the newly elected Popular Front Government of the Republic. A direct response to the election of a Communist encouraged Popular Front government that year. The elected Parliament was definitely radical but just as clearly not a communist government.

The Working Class Factor

Anarchism, perhaps the most pernicious anti-working class ideology then operating in Europe, had had success in Northern Italy and Spain during the 1800’s. It was such a serious threat to proper working class ideology that General Secretary Karl Marx sent the First International of Workingmen away from Europe to the USA as we saw above. In the US the then (1876) 19 chapters of North American communist First International workers dissolved it altogether, as Marx had wished, and went on to create their own Workingmen’s Party of the USA.(Pick this up in Part III Chapter 23, below.)

However, in Spain, the anarchists had created a following among the oppressed masses of landless agricultural workers in places like Catalonia and Andalusia. For us in North America think of the Grange with its “agrarian radicalism” over the last century or so and you will have a rough idea of what this kind of thinking amounts too, although in North America the farmers involved were far better off than those who had literally nothing in Spain. Yet the rural political idiocy shines through. This anarchist tradition among the landless agricultural laborers of Spain provided the base upon which the trade union form of anarchism could and did build as the returning capitalists began creating factories in Catalonia and Andalusia.

One can see that, what Karl Marx might have called the idiocy of rural poor peasant landless worker life, meant among other things the only relationship these oppressed masses had had with any state (army and police) – for 6000 years - was one of being the subjects of insatiable “tax” collecting. This was the extreme and unjust extortion the rulers insisted upon; rulers who saw to it a host of inhuman indignities were visited upon the lower-than-farm-animals farmer population, regularly. The idea that the state (the army and police) – any state (any army and police) - is the source of all evil (the main anarchist tenet) found easy acceptance among this mass of dehumanized poor.

This is all anarchism is in reality. That is all it has ever been. Mature intellectuals here and everywhere should already have learned this and most have. But there are still those around too lazy to undertake a scientific study of history. Marx and Engels proved what the state is and archaeology has confirmed that judgment. End of story.

The Lay of the Land

From 1902 to 1909 Spanish anarchist leaders built a following among the industrial proletariat emerging in the new capitalist factories originating in this rural hell. These are the anarcho-syndicalists (Syndicate being another popular term for “Unions” in those days.). In 1909 they created their first national trade union called the CNT – which stands for Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (National Work Confederation). Syndicalism is the theory that workers can take control of a nation simply by taking control of shops, factories, farms and other enterprises without first confronting and destroying the bourgeois state.

Marxism was not without adherents in Spain. It had its own union called the UGT (General Workers Union) and with the return of the expatriate capitalists it began to grow rapidly. Proper Marxism (Bolshevism) calls for armed confrontation with the capitalist state and its destruction before workers can proceed to construct socialism.

But there are Marxists and there are Marxists. It was not until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that correct Marxism (Leninism – the PCE) really took off jumping from perhaps only 10,000 members that year to 200,000 members by 1918. It was however still quite small compared to the 700,000 members in the anarchist CNT that year. In the succeeding decade the UGT grew to one million members as did the CNT and the landless agricultural workers were a larger class still at over two million. The UGT was still quite divided (revisionists vs. revolutionaries) in terms of socialist objectives and had of course an underlying strong trade union issues orientation.

So as 1936 dawned, the CPSU(b) General Line (thus, the Comintern general line) had only the very small Spanish Communist Party (PCE) representing it in Spain. Against that stood not just this massive anarchist problem but the additional complication of real Trotskyists and a plethora of so-called “independent” Marxist groups including what quickly became a de facto quasi-Trotskyist ultra-left Party called the POUM (which roughly translated stands for Workers Party of Marxist Unification) under the leadership of Trotsky’s former personal secretary Andres Nin. Finally there was the Socialist Party of Spain (the principal Party in the UGT) which Stalin wanted in 1936 in unification with the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). The Socialist Party leader furthest to the Left was Francisco Largo Caballero, who had taken on the title of the “Spanish Lenin”, but he was far from that. Largo Caballero did not want to unify with the communists and this along with other fallings-out led to his early replacement as the Civil War unfolded.

The truth is there was no Spanish Lenin. Nor could the Comintern make one out of the raw material available which included the best of the Spanish Marxists such as Dolores Ibarruri. Stalin knew all this and had sent his favorite Chekist – Alexander Orlov – to make a personal tour of the Spanish situation in the spring of 1936. Orlov left behind a working cadre of Chekists in key cities to support the Republic should Stalin decide to do what he was thinking about in April and May of 1936.

Stalin did decide to act by way of sending volunteers and instructed Orlov to make up for lost development time in what might otherwise have been a typical Party-building exercise in a de facto Third World (colonial type) country. Orlov did his best, but in the end nothing the Soviets did could turn Spain into a country with a unified working class under Leninist leadership – not in the short time available.

The Technological and Political Status of Spanish Capitalism

Capitalist technological applications were not restricted to mining and agriculture but were making rapid inroads in far more complex technological areas such as aircraft construction. For example the best airplane engine of the entire First World War was built in prototype form by the Spanish steel complex and auto manufacturer Hispano-Suiza. The actual construction shifted immediately to the advanced capitalist countries for use in the air war of that Great Conflict (1914-1918). Spain did not have the manufacturing capability yet to produce aircraft by mass production, but as we can see it definitely had the corps of scientists and engineers from which such capability could be built and in the years after the World War, Spanish capital and its workers got on with the job.

Thirty Years Later

However, in the thirty years following the end of the US-Spanish War, the returning expatriate Spanish capitalists had had an insufficient amount of time to come up with a unified national political solution to their problems. As we have seen these were problems peculiar to the stunted developmental road Spain had been following for four centuries. The new would-be rulers had to confront the sociocultural consequences of problems that face any nation undergoing rapid social and cultural evolution, not to mention this specific developmental inheritance. That four century historical interregnum of national technological stagnation acted to drag the entire nation behind as it attempted to hothouse its way into the modern capitalist world.

As in China it would be the criminal element within the capitalist class which came to the rescue. Meyer Lansky, Big-eared Du, and Chiang Kai-shek had a new equal and his name was Juan March!

“Background” Inside Snapshots

United Front against Fascism

1935 The Seventh Comintern Congress

“George (Dimitrov), I needed to see you before this extremely important Comintern Congress.”

“I understand, Comrade Stalin. I know how important this ‘united front against fascism’ strategy is going to be and I don’t see any real problem since the Trotskyites are not present and even if they were their program is so far left it effectively negates any united front with the social democrats.”

“Fuck them and listen to what I have to say.

“You have no idea how many foreign capitalist plots the Cheka uncovers on a daily basis against our Socialist motherland. In Western Europe there is just one fascist coup attempt after another and eventually one of them in some unlucky country is successful. I don’t give two sweet fucks about ‘strategy agreement’. What I want is for the British comrades to stand up and stop British intervention against us no matter how it is disguised. Karl Marx stopped this exact same class of mother fucking cocksuckers (this is the best my limited ability at English interpretation can give the Russian profanity – ed.) from entering the American civil war on the side of the slavocrat regime in Richmond and I expect them to do the same thing now! – And, the French comrades and so forth. Marx did it on his own and forged an alliance of working class elements and financed it with international contributions. He didn’t have an entire state apparatus and its financial resources to help him as they now have. God damm it, I expect them to start effectively standing up against the fascist capitalist plot to form a united front around a London-Berlin-Rome axis for World War II against us! Now do you see?”

“No. Not exactly Comrade Stalin.”

 “Jesus Fucking Christ George. You are as loyal a comrade as there is but you are fucking dense. You need to use this Comintern Congress to fire up the comrades to stand up with armed resistance in France, England, Belgium, the Netherlands, and so forth. Wherever they can, they should stand up and fight back in armed strikes and hopefully armed insurrection against this international capitalist war policy against us. Guns in the streets George. Against fascism and force the social democrats to take our side or theirs. They have to learn how to fight fascism in practice! Our unions are to make it clear that these ‘democratic parliamentary’ countries will not countenance a joint attack with the fascist states against us, or face civil war...

“Buy me more time! Believe me when I tell you I am pushing our labor-power beyond its possibilities as it is! Even so, I have to have at least five more years of freedom from war to finish our minimum industrialization, and we need our foreign comrades to fight against war and for peace with us. Comrades in the UK and France and anywhere where the fascists don’t already have complete control.”

The boss rested and waited.

“I see Comrade Stalin. Okay, I’ll do it. It’s not exactly how I planned to implement a united front policy with the Second International but I think I see what you mean, and I certainly understand why.”

“That’s it George, You come and see me when the Congress is over.”

The boss walked to the door, opening it, indicating as he did that the Comintern’s new leader, George Dimitrov, was dismissed. The Boss was still pissed off, thinking, “this Dimitrov is too stupid to run this thing, for Christ’s sake, why did I pick him?”

Back at his desk Stalin hit the intercom button: “Poksrebyshev where is Molotov?”

“On his way Boss.”

“Show him in when he gets here.”

Trotsky and Stalin had been the only ones with access to Lenin unannounced. With Stalin no one had access without announcement. No one had access without being fully searched. Just in case Stalin had a “Bolo” (.30 cal. Mauser pistol popular with Bolshevik officers and Non-coms) holstered under his military jacket (and a Tommy Gun under the desk in his office and on the floor of whatever car he was riding in which itself was changed daily).

Molotov entered as Poksrebyshev opened the door, announcing “Comrade Molotov.”

“Vlad refresh my memory. Why did I pick this Bulgarian, Dimitrov, last year?”

“I don’t know how many you consulted but when you asked me I recommended him. Now, before you explode Koba let me say I know what you are thinking. But Dimitrov has strong points, not the least of which is he reads every petition and letter sent from every Comrade, not to mention from every Party, and he responds to each thoughtfully and personally. He spends so many hours at work his colleagues call him ‘stone ass’.”

“So, that’s why you picked him he has your nick name, ha ha.”

Molotov continued unfazed.

“He is well liked. He is certainly well meaning, with an outstanding class and political background. What he lacks in audacity or quick reaction capability can be made up by close advisors and I have several for you to look at. Also, we can bolster his good points as well with a larger and better organized secretariat. In short, don’t worry. I understand the situation and have it in hand.”

“Thank you Vlad. I feel better now. Yes everything you said is true and we will have a man up front the Comrades like. That’s extremely important. I like the guy – it’s just that he seems such a cream-puff. Anyway, no matter how many spies we have, nor how many soldiers and sailors and airmen, in the end it is the Comrades around the world who can stop the capitalists from attacking us as a united front. As long as we have one side or the other of the imperialist camp when war breaks out we will win. If we have the industrial base by that time equivalent to any one of these two emerging camps.

“Now I know what to say to him.”

The Boss walked to the side of his main desk and hit that familiar button.

“Poksrebyshev get Dimitrov back in here.”

“Yes sir.”

Poor George Dimitrov almost had a heart attack when several Chekists tackled him at the gate before he could get in the car taking him back to his hotel. But, they soon had him back upstairs, if somewhat flustered and irritated he was shown in…

“Comrade Dimitrov” announced Poksrebyshev.

“Sorry if they roughed you up George I just wanted to go over one important thing with you. I know you have done great work in Bulgaria and for the Comintern but I want you to start thinking in broad historical terms. Our North American comrades have placed a man at the head of their Party (William Z. Foster) who thinks the way we here in the Politburo do. Meaning in broad historical strokes actually materialized, as he sweeps one mass of workers in one critical industry after another into the right kind of unionization. Their Party then recruits the best and brightest in this emerging mass movement. We need to be doing similar things internationally via the Comintern. For example we have these Nazi Summer Olympics coming up next year – Why not have the Comintern organize an alternative Socialist International Olympics in Spain somewhere?

“We have been in the League of Nations, for what two years now - and all that pile of shit is, is a cabal of fascist nations and fascist enabling nations. Italy is attacking North Africa and Ethiopia. Trying to find a place to put their unemployed workers and poverty stricken farmers without making any changes to ruling class ownership of that sorry fucked-up country. The Brits own the League of Nations and do pretty much what they like there which right now is to bend over backwards to urge Hitler to attack us! The only important capitalist country not actively attacking us there is the United States and that is only because they had the good sense not to get involved with all that human garbage. Max (Litvinov) does the best he can but he needs help too. The Comintern should use our mass organizations to begin demanding the League do the things that Litvinov is demanding. Like standing up to Mussolini and Hitler!

“Anyway, the point is to try and sweep natural opponents of fascism into different kinds of mass manifestations. That’s it George. Any questions?”

“Yes Comrade Stalin. Do you think this time I can go back to my hotel without getting the shit beat out of me?” Then he laughed.

As did Stalin and Molotov. Dimitrov was on his way. Stalin would have placed his arm around him but Stalin was too short so he simply walked Dimitrov into the Foyer where the Chekists who brought him were awaiting their own fate.

“Boys you did good. Comrade Dimitrov agrees do you not?”

“Of course comrades and I appreciate your devotion to service to the chief of our international working class movement.”

“Now Boys do you think you can get him back to his hotel without beating the shit out of him?”

“Just a light beating Boss?” The Sergeant joked.

Stalin frowned and that was the end of the jesting and they were on their way as the Boss said,

“Go.”

General Tukhachevsky at the George V Funeral in London 1935

“Thank you for this complete report on our Prima Donna. I don’t need this right now but we’re going to have to deal with it.” The Boss walked to his friend Lavrenti Beria with good hand extended. They were in Stalin’s Staraya Street office complex; a building where they both worked. The subject: the Red Army’s most famous officer.

“He started out as a Bonapartist. Only that cocksucker Trotsky would have hired him and pushed him forward. Then he was a communist and now he is an ultra-left communist or Trotskyite undercover.” Commented Beria.

“I wouldn’t care about all that if he would keep his mouth shut. I told him in no uncertain terms to do exactly that before I sent him to the funeral of that piece-of-shit King in London but it obviously didn’t do any good. You know the problem Lavrenti. If the Nazi’s get the idea we are going after them no matter what, then they may well fall for the Baldwin plot to construct a London-Berlin-Rome axis. Tukhachevsky is effectively a provocateur with all those bullshit speeches abroad, about how we are going to rap the Nazi pig’s snout so well it will never dare stick its nose into our socialist garden, blah, blah, bullshit! He wants to fight them right now and I certainly do not. Before a week had gone by the Anglo-American forces would join in against us and then the Japs and the Frogs.

“We will have to deal with him eventually. The real problem is he has a base of support in the Politburo and they won’t replace him unless he presents a clear and present danger. He would not have ignored everything I told him before he left unless he was conspiring with others, certainly in the Army, and probably in the Politburo too. He may well plan on using his ultra-left “attack Nazism” talk to build a base of support in the Army and the Party for a Bonapartist coup, somewhere down the road. That is what he has always been – a Bonapartist. Even though he denies it now. I want you to get ready to handle this – we will need irrefutable proof. Remember, we cannot survive without Rapallo intact in the West. Lenin knew it and set it up this way. I won’t let this aristocrat cocksucker Tukhachevsky, or anyone else for that matter, negate this arrangement.

“Furthermore, my friend, Tukhachevsky already has a base of support in the officer corps. This is mainly true out here in the West but his influence runs throughout the Red Army. The worst part of that is he is resisting the reorganization of the military-industrial complex along the lines I have proposed as our general line in the air and on the ground in terms of the land tank and the flying tank we have to have when this Second World War starts. I am not sure why, but I think it has to do with the differences in how Deep Battle is to be implemented among our officers – even in the Frunze academy. It may be simply because I support the land tank-air tank approach, that he opposes it. There are always plenty of malcontents with this Deep Battle strategy who will listen to this kind of talk.

“At any rate I know he was conspiring with Zinoviev and so probably others too. Can you handle this when the time comes?”

“Yes. How much time do I have?”

“Given the necessity of getting unanimous Politburo consent, as much as you need. Given the condition of Europe now, perhaps two or three years.”

“As you can see in the report we have total penetration on (Czechoslovak President) Benes. That’s where we will get the proof. I’ll keep you informed.”

“You’re ready to pick them up whenever?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want the Cheka involved at all. That idiot Yagoda is on his way out and I’m not sure his replacement is any more reliable. Besides the Lubyanka leaks like a sieve as far as the Party is concerned. Use your own network (SMERSH) and do keep me informed step by step as the intelligence accumulates.”

“Is there anything else Koba?”

“Yes. One more thing.”

Death of a King: Wallis Simpson 1935

“Lavrenti what I am about to tell you is known only to me and two men in Red Army Intelligence. When we were in China in force, Red Army G2 (GRU) recruited a number of English-speaking agents. One of them is an American woman named Wallis Simpson. Actually Lav as I recall she has as many names as we do, but in her case it is because she has had so many husbands. At any rate the latest man in her career is the Prince of Wales...”

“The new King!”

“Yes. This piece-of-shit is going to be coronated soon, now that the funeral of the old King is completed. The problem is this guy is an outright Nazi. A personal friend of Himmler and Hitler and he acts as a German agent in his own country. This makes this particular royal reactionary unacceptable to us. This is exactly what we do not want. “(British Prime Minister) Baldwin is engineering a plot against us of his own and the class behind him currently does not want to go to war with us with Hitler at its head. I don’t want them to change their mind because of this new cocksucker on the Throne. So, what is the answer?

“In this case, because we have Prince David’s girlfriend on our payroll, it seems to me we should be able to get him to abdicate, hopefully before his rapidly approaching coronation. Fortunately, the Baldwin clique hates him and I want you to run her in such a way as to make her multiple previous marriages an ‘unacceptability’ issue over which Baldwin will force this new King to do exactly that. How exactly would this be done? “The Prince is all fucked up sexually just like all the Brit aristocrats and completely subject to fetish manipulation. This is how she hooked him. He will give up the Throne rather than his daily sexual excesses which at any rate could not be easily satisfied elsewhere for a whole bunch of reasons. Am I amusing you? ”

“I’m laughing because I never dreamed such a thing was going on and probably wouldn’t have believed it if you hadn’t told me. Yes, I can get her to continue to take him down the fetish road to Roman decadence, if everything checks out in the file.

“Koba, as usual you caught me by surprise with this but… I don’t need to know who they are, but I do need to know if there are other Army Intel agents in England that the Cheka does not know about? This will be an important consideration in planning.”

“Yes. But I think we should run her as an individual agent with a specialized control.”

“Of course, and G2 will know about the others so we won’t step on any toes.”

“This is the only copy in existence of her file. Take it with you and brief yourself and then link up with the GRU generals. I want it back and uncopied. Lav I know you can do this and you are the only one I trust to take over the project. That asshole Yagoda I have already blocked from working with any of our networks in West Europe and I certainly would not want him or the Cheka under his leadership, or anyone else’s for that matter, to know anything about this.”

“I understand. I’ll take care of it. I promise you their new King will resign.”

“Thank you Lav.”

- And, as an historical note, the King did abdicate.

British Collaboration with Fascism

In the decade 1926 to 1936 the British ruling class was as deeply involved in plotting to overthrow the Soviet government as it was possible to be. By 1936 this led to outright support for fascism in its various forms, although in ways more subtle than sending troops. Its new blatant pro-fascist foreign policy began in Spain. After 1936, British and French ruling oligarchs would continue to try and get the Germans to take the point right up and until they were either overcome (as the French were in 1940) or until after Hitler had first taken them to the mat (as he did with the UK, also in 1940).

The policy in short was to attack the USSR once the Brit and French ruling cap families could get Germany to take the point. The strategy of the British ruling Conservative (Tory) Party was to manipulate events so as to come up with a London-Berlin-Rome axis. What had thrown PM Stanley Baldwin (and his successor Neville Chamberlain) a curve was the unexpected ascent of Hitler to power in 1933.

The reason this ascent of one King from another had thrown them into a tizzy was because the minority section of the British ruling class was cravenly pro-Nazi and led by this new King Edward VIII*. In his short pre-coronation time on the Throne, this new King, (who would last less than one year), had threatened Prime Minister Baldwin in March of 1936 with abdication should Baldwin go to war against Germany for any reason but at that critical moment because Hitler had just militarily seized the Alsace-Lorraine region on the French border.

Baldwin represented the majority section of the ruling cap families and they did not want to go to war with Russia with Hitler at the head of Germany! Furthermore, they had no use for the new King’s idea of restoring total Monarchy – a la the years prior to the coming of Cromwell. – And, Cromwell was their greatest most terrifying class memory.

*****

*[Note: Later, as the Duke of Windsor, at the outset of World War II in 1940, David (formerly the Prince of Wales and formerly, abdicated, King Edward) would perform the ultimate treason in providing Hitler with all of the British and French defensive plans just in time for the Germans to break through by circumventing the Maginot line and striking through the weakest front of French defenses. At the time the traitor Duke was on the British General Staff in Paris, preparing the joint defense of France from Nazi invasion. Britain never had a greater traitor than this Windsor King.

The Duke’s brother and always stupid King of England sent one of our agents (Anthony Blunt – then #5 in “the MI-6 Ring of Five” as the Crown would later be forced to admit under Margaret Thatcher) to search for and destroy his brother, former King of England, David’s (now Duke of Windsor) 1930’s and 1940’s letters to the Nazi’s, the sitting King believed to be in the possession of Windsor relatives in Germany. Blunt went right into Germany following the American and British troops as they entered Nazi Germany. Whatever he found was taken directly to the King of England (and, of course, Joseph Stalin.) I assume this would have made Stalin laugh his ass off. Of course, Stalin had known about David, and his Nazi plotting, for many years, as you will see below, in the section Death of a King: Wallis Simpson.]

Allergic to Cromwell

However, it was only the British ruler’s allergy to Cromwell (and the English Revolution of 1640-1680; see Chapter 12 above) that stopped an immediate joint attack on the USSR by Britain, France and Italy with Germany in the lead. When one sets aside what was in their minds the ideological nonsense, it was clear to Baldwin and the great majority of Britain’s wealthiest families, that Hitler was another Cromwell and that they could not stomach! After all Cromwell had almost finished them off, abolishing the Monarchy and the House of Lords.

Alexander Orlov kept Stalin apprised of the machinations of Baldwin’s cabinet and Edward’s rancid Court via his spies Philby, Blunt, Burgess, and MacClean. Meanwhile in Spain the billionaire boss of criminal bosses and Spanish fascist chieftain Juan March was sufficiently encouraged by Britain’s de facto collaboration with Hitler over the Alsace-Lorraine he authorized armed revolt (and provided all of the finance) for Spanish fascism and gave the go ahead for a Spanish fascist army officers uprising once again. This time in July, 1936.

However, Stalin (again because of his spies) had anticipated this development and had dispatched Orlov to Spain in March of 1936 to prepare the way for indirect intervention when the time came. This because the Chekists in charge of Iberia had kept Stalin apprised of the secret fascist conspiracy to overthrow the moderate bourgeois Madrid regime. He knew it was only a matter of time until the plot was brought to fruition.

Counterpoint

Stalin realized it was important to put up some resistance to the fascists in Spain for a variety of reasons but he could not (officially) send the Red Army. He would have to rely on Orlov’s organizing partisan and perhaps regular warfare along the lines of what he had done for Stalin in Russia’s civil war as we have already reviewed.

Orlov left behind a working network of agents and Stalin followed up with (unofficial – in fact, disguised) Soviet pilots and tank crews and then infantry in the form of volunteers (what became the International Brigades) when the fascist conspirators succeeded in moving their army from North Africa to the peninsula.

Stalin knew the delicate nature of the work in Spain. Accordingly, he pulled Orlov out of his British and other West European responsibilities and gave him sole command of Soviet operations in Spain in July (1936.)

The Tire Meets the Asphalt – August 1936

So, by the time Juan March gave the order (July 17th) to overthrow the Republican government in Madrid, Stalin had his organization in place in Spain, barely (July 30th), 1936. – And, within weeks, international volunteers began to show up along with Soviet troops and weapons. For them and for us, as the tire-met-the-asphalt, as they say, it would be a chance to do a little “ass-kicking.”

Inside Snapshot – Spain and Stalin’s Decision

August 2, 1936

On a broiling summer day in August, 1936, Joseph Stalin, in military uniform, was pacing in front of the door leading to the foyer of his Staraya street office, as was his custom in dress and conduct, awaiting the arrival of his European Spy boss code-named Alexander Orlov (Lev Feldbin). His secretary, A. N. Poskrebyshev, announced the arrival of Stalin’s closest associate and Politburo member Vyascheslav Molotov, and seconds later the arrival of Orlov.

Molotov examined the map of Spain, someone from Stalin’s secretariat had set-up in the center of the room, minutes earlier. Stalin bear-hugged the entering NKVD General.

“Thank goodness your back Lev.”

“Koba. It’s always wonderful to see you again. You too Vlad.”

“We have as much time today as you wish. Now go ahead and brief me on Spain.” Stalin continued to stand as Orlov went to the map and began as follows:

 “Following the instructions you gave me I proceeded under alias to Barcelona and then visited our Party leaders in each of the cities you specified. Along the way I deposited our Spanish speaking intelligence officers and a small staff in each of these locales. Of course, we have short-wave contact with all of them. We are now in a position to do whatever we may be ordered to do next.

“As for the situation in general, it’s a mixed bag. On the positive side the Republican government controls the center and most populated portion of the country. It has an excellent armored force, good aircraft and an outstanding navy. Furthermore the working class is uniformly anti-fascist and totally committed to volunteer labour to the degree necessary to man the war industries. Premier among these industries is the Hispano Suiza industrial complex.

“On the negative side the problem area is already clear. At least to me. – And, that is even normal military education is unavailable to what will have to be a new generation of Army officers, since almost all of those field grade and above (Major and above in US parlance – ed) are fascist and have now to be replaced. Not that this is the worst of it.  The Anarchist, Syndicalist, Trotskyite, and other ultra-left Marxist nutballs are a far more serious problem because they have fractionated portions of the working class, in those areas where they have an apparatus. Our own Party is still quite small but that will change, I suspect, if we intervene along the lines you indicated you were considering a few months ago. On the other hand it may be too late for us to turn the tide with our volunteer forces, although I think it is now a matter of timing.

“If we intervene quickly we may be able to save the Republicans, at least for the moment. Our prestige and that of our correspondent Party will increase enormously. In short, if the Republican’s lose, it will be because of the ultra-left crackpot ideas which have infected the Army. By which I mean all this bullshit about soldier’s committees, direct election and worst of all direct recall of officers and NCOs. As usual, the ultra-left has learned nothing from our experience in our Civil War.

“My recommendation is that we force the imposition of clarity on the Left. They must be made to accept the advances in the organization of the people as a whole in the form of their own Revolutionary, if not Red, Army. However, inevitably, we will have to convince the Republican leaders to liquidate the ultra-left, before it can completely infect and thereby totally destroy the entire Republican resistance.”

Normally used to cover maps for tracing, the Old Bolsheviks had gotten used to using transparent paper to plan battle tactics. Orlov pulled down on a transparent paper rolled tight above the map of Spain and drew a line with a red crayon and several black circles.

“Now on the map this is what the current disposition of forces of both the Republican’s and the Fascist Order of Battle looks like. These are the danger points. A seizure of Madrid could be “the checkmate in four moves” that would end this war before it really gets started.

“To prevent this collapse from occurring and to prepare a decent war plan for1937 we would have to do, at the minimum, the following.”

Orlov then handed one copy of his “eyes only” final report (the only copy) to Stalin directly who took it to his desk and placed squarely in front of the chair he would eventually assume when resuming desk-work.

“As the fundamental decisions are yours and the Politburo’s I want to raise the question of whether it is worth it to invest the time and treasure necessary to secure this rather primitive country’s Left Government. I mean even if they win they will require huge amounts of foreign assistance or investment, however you want to look at it, and whether this is worth it when we are struggling to prepare for the inevitable coming World War here at home, should be, I think, the central question.

“Finally, I don’t think Yagoda is up to this. I have had nothing but trouble with him over our European operations and he is completely out of his depth. It’s bad enough we have to keep him out of the UK altogether. In Spain we can’t afford one fuck up.

“Now Koba, I’m ready to answer specific questions.”

“First Lev let me thank you for your wonderful work. You have always made me proud, and while I have made many mistakes over the years, appointing you chief of European intelligence was certainly not one of them. Quite the opposite.  While you were taking care of business so brilliantly in Spain I have been confronting a rapidly escalating international situation that has required the kinds of critical decisions you refer to and I’ll bring you up to speed,

“As you know Baldwin gave Hitler Alsace-Lorraine in March. That was their signal to Germany that England did not oppose their territorial readjustment ideas – which of course includes Hitler’s long promised attack on us. It may be the civil war in Spain is going to be the critical test to the Germans as to whether they are really ready for war with us – in short, we have to bloody their nose in Spain for our own good. – And, there is the additional fact the Spanish can pay for our assistance – they have perhaps a thousand tons of gold in their treasury we could take as equity against the cost of armaments and which we could use.

“However, dialectically, it is definitely a great risk for us to get involved in Spain. You can be sure that the ruling oligarchy of capitalists in England and France will try and terrify their own bourgeoisie, especially their petty bourgeoisie, with the specter of a “Red Army invasion of Spain.” They want to join with Hitler and Mussolini for a combined attack on us. As you know it is only the Brit’s desire to remove Hitler and put in a Government in Berlin more amenable to their anti-Cromwellian prejudices which has so far delayed the Baldwin plot for a London-Berlin-Rome axis against us.

“On the one hand, I need and must have combat specifications on reliability, fire power, armor, speed and most importantly produceability, for our new Main Battle Tanks. - And, we need all kinds of specs for our aircraft. This mess in Spain gives us the objective conditions for such combat testing.

“On the other hand, as I just explained, we certainly cannot send the Red Army. Nor the Red Navy. But we can send entire necessary military units in civilian clothes and then put them into Republican uniforms for their tank force and air force. What we can do openly is to send international volunteers – the first contingent of these will be primarily our best Soviet youth – but the International force should emphasize the non-Communist anti-fascist youth from the major capitalist countries that will have gone to Spain to fight fascism. We are to be seen as a good friend and partner in the spirit of the “United Front against Fascism” doctrine adopted last year by the Comintern Congress.

“I can and will send our modern tanks and warplanes and the crews to man them but again they will have Republican markings and their drivers, crews and pilots will wear Republican uniforms. As you send back data on machinery performance I will see that we update the engineers in the design institutes and get the changes and modifications performed super quickly. Oh yes you Lev. You’re taking over in Spain.

“I will provide you with a blank check on Chekists. You should pick the staff you want while you are here to take with you and appoint permanent liaison officers to secure a continuing flow of men and materiel from the Soviet Union to the Spanish Republic. I will see to it that they get 100% support here. It’s up to you to see that they are properly deployed in the war zone. This should be child’s play for you as it is a replay of what we did in the Civil War, together Lev, and especially as you disrupted the Polish capitalist-feudalist armies in 1920.

“Finally, the Spanish have the money to pay for our support so I expect them to use it. If they did not we would of course pay the bill but since they do have it and as you properly point out we are in a life and death struggle to industrialize before the next world wide assault of the capitalists against us, they should use it. This money is in the form of hundreds of tons of gold and silver; the remnants of their rape of the New World. The day will come when I will tell them through Ambassador Rosenthal to send that gold here for safekeeping and for security against the cost of our military support. But you have to take charge of that personally Lev.

“As for Yagoda I will replace him.

“Before you go to get things together I want you to come with me to the Kremlin. I have a visiting Party delegation from the United States. I want you to meet them. We’ll take advantage of the opportunity to talk and grab a bite to eat along the way.” The Boss was always thinking several steps ahead.

Juan March as Meyer Lansky and Big-Eared Du

As we have seen Spain had its own boss of the illegal capitalist element in the equation and his name was Juan March. The Spanish equivalent of Meyer Lansky and Big-eared Du, March was variously referred to as a “gangster” and a “pirate” (all true) but was in fact, and most importantly, the Spanish top organized crime boss. Furthermore he had selected General Francisco Franco early on as the “comer” he was going to back. He wanted someone competent to overthrow the silly government in Madrid.

Francisco Franco

Franco was almost a dwarf in stature, but he had proven his military competence in Africa and his intelligence as chief of the Army War College. Most importantly he was a dyed in the wool fascist of the monarchist persuasion.

Carlos Prieto once told me (~1962; well before Franco’s death) the most fascinating thing to him about Franco “…is that Franco actually believes he is inferior to the Monarchs as are all common people!” I pass it on to you for what it’s worth.

I recall the most interesting thing about Franco to me when I visited Spain in April, 1961, while beginning in the intelligence service, was that Franco was still alive and running the show!

March and Franco Together Forever

Anyway, March’s price?  Total control of Spain’s foreign commerce.

In the end Juan March would succeed by gaining legal complete control of foreign commerce from Franco’s insurgent government. Most importantly initially in the sale of the ores of Rio Tinto and those of Asturias and the Basque Provinces to Nazi Germany.

March would pay his way alright – by paying all of Franco’s costs in the build-up to fascist rebellion. Wherever and whenever Franco needed cash and credit, March was there with that cash and credit in small, medium and huge quantities as the right wing fascist officer’s conspiracy took on new life. Nor were his banks just in fascist countries but in England as well, where Baldwin and Chamberlain were well aware of what was going on and turned the other eye.

Cynics might imply non-accidental causes to General Sanjurjo’s crashing on takeoff from nearby Lisbon, Portugal, in an over-loaded airplane the night the rebellion began in Spain. However, that may have been, one thing is for sure and that is with the passing of the Old General, who had before fucked-up an attempt to overthrow the Republican government, the revolt had to find a leader. March was more than ready to back the ploy of his favorite general, the rather dwarfish Franco, who at the moment was stranded in Spanish Morocco unable to cross into Spain as the Spanish navy was in the hands of the Republicans.

March had hired a plane in London to go and get Franco, languishing in the Canary Islands, and take him to Morocco. March paid the freight all the way. He then financed Franco’s emissary to Mussolini charged with buying 12 planes to help ferry fascist troops from Morocco to Spain. He deposited 1.2 billion US dollars in gold in an Italian bank at that time. The real purpose was to pay the cost and especially the bribes to the Mussolini gang for 50,000 Italian troops.

March had his hand everywhere where Franco was going to need it, and this gave Franco the edge when he needed it most. Even though it was Hitler who first succumbed to Franco’s entreaties for help, sending 20 JU-52 transport planes to lift his North African army into peninsular Spain and overall sent the most important help to him from the fascist bloc of countries, it was the Italian Mafia March had to please to get them and Mussolini involved. He did so with his transfer of such large quantities of money to Italy and its Mafioso bankers.

Once again, speaking historically, the gangster element of the capitalist class had saved their class brothers from themselves. March was instituting a fascist dictatorship in its own Spanish mafia image.

In the event it was Hitler’s air power that lifted Franco’s Foreign Legionnaires and Spanish Ghurkas (called Moors) to Spain. These were the troops the fascists used under Franco to massacre Badajoz and then the manpower for their march toward Madrid. It was Mussolini’s soon thereafter arriving troops that gave the final impetus to the fascist Franco’s drive on Madrid.

The Kirov Investigation Concluded

In August of 1936 Zinoviev was brought to trial along with several others for conspiring with Trotsky and other foreign powers against the Soviet Union. He and they were charged with inspiring and organizing the assassination of Sergey Kirov in 1934. He was shot following his confession and conviction. Meanwhile,

The War is off and Running

During July and August, 1936, Hitler’s JU-52 transports made 461 flights transferring 7,350 troops from Spanish Morocco to neighboring Spain. In Spain 324 more Nazi flights lifted 5,455 more troops. Rebel generals in Spain began coming over to Franco bringing some 120,000 more Spanish troops with them. Hitler would send 50,000 German troops to help Franco, Mussolini 150,000 Italian troops; Dr. Salazar the fascist dictator of Portugal sent 20,000 troops to help Franco. In terms of war materiel the fascist block (Germany-Italy-Portugal) sent the Spanish Fascist army 1,150 tanks and other armored vehicles, 1,650 warplanes and 2,700 artillery pieces.

Our side immediately began the shipping of very large quantities of war materiel and troops to the Spanish Republic. This was not an easy task. Our only military naval support for Spain was in the Black Sea. So, unarmed freighters had to carry all this to Republican ports at Barcelona and Valencia. Nazi and Italian warships and planes constantly watched this activity waiting for a chance to attack which would have to be in the unloading process unless these two aggressor nations were ready for war with the Red Army which they were not.

Orlov was commanding the Soviet effort on the ground as we have seen. Also, incoming top troubleshooters included General Jan Karlovich Berzin Chief of Red Army G2 (Intelligence) as direct official liaison and chief military advisor to the Spanish Army and V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko as Consul-General in Barcelona.

The first Left boots on the ground to arrive were 2000+ Soviet volunteers. Then some 60,000 foreign volunteers arrived to form International battalions grouped into International Brigades which were then used to stiffen the ranks of the loyal Republican Army units. The North Americans for example formed several battalions the most famous of which was the Abraham Lincoln battalion of the 13th International Brigades. In everyday talk these North Americans were often referred to as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Stalin sent Spain 648 warplanes, 407 tanks including 60 armored cars, 1,186 artillery pieces, 20,486 machine guns, 498,000 rifles. To instruct and use these weapons Stalin sent 2,065 “Specialist Commanders” including 772 pilots, 351 tankers, 100 artillery men, 222 general advisors, and 204 interpreters.

The Soviets would send over the next three years a huge amount of food, fuel, lubricants, medicine, medical personnel, and the shells, bullets and bombs that are used up on a regular basis during combat.

Our Heroes save Madrid but at a High Cost

Of the 60,000 volunteers we sent to Spain we lost at least half of them and the majority of that loss occurred during the initial phases of the Battle for Madrid (November 1936 through April 1937) where we lost at least 20,000 men. (Among the International Brigades there were only a few women and only one in the US unit named the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Marion Merriman, the wife of US communist Major Robert Merriman, the Battalion’s first combat commander.) These were people who put their lives on the line, where only their mouths had been. (It was Ernest Hemingway’s friend Merriman who was the model for Hemingway’s hero Robert Jordon in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls). No people deserve more respect from us 2011 Bolsheviks than those who went to Spain.

Next Generation of Red Army Officers comes from the Spanish Civil War

As the Spanish war unfolded during 1937, Stalin began the purge and reorganization of both the Red Army and its supporting Military-Industrial complex. Spain turned out to be the key most important training ground for the new Red Army Officer Corps, including the elite Marshal’s Council and 40 new Generals from the upcoming field grade officers. Many future high ranking officers fought in Spain as Lieutenants and Captains.

As I say, forty new generals (1 to 4 stars) and rear admirals were promoted from this corps of “blooded” combat officers who had volunteered for Spain. Of those some became critically acclaimed for their conduct during the coming Second World War including R. Y. Malinovsky, who became a Marshal and Commissar for Defense for the USSR; K. A. Meretskov became a Marshal and Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army; G. I. Kulikl, became a Marshal and Deputy Commissar for Defense of the USSR; N. G. Kuznetsov, became a Fleet Admiral (Naval equivalent to an Army marshal) and Commissar for the Red Navy and a member of the STAVKA high command throughout the entire war.

Our Secret Service Heroes do Their Portion

Kim Philby

Kim Philby looked more “Windsor” than the Windsor’s. Average too tall in height, cool and clear blue eyes, blond hair, perfectly slim and fit physically, proper pedigree, perfect manners, proper educational background from beginning to end and high marks to go with it. Now he was in Saragossa at the Maria Isabel, the finest hotel in that city in 1937. He had been sending reports from Burgos since February of 1937 and by May, thanks to his father and Orlov, had been made The Times official correspondent attached to the fascist Falangist Party’s forces now unified under General Francisco Franco.

His editors turned out to be thrilled as he had provided The Times, and gained its editors, the prestige which had evaded them for some time, in terms of “balanced and fair” coverage of the “Continental” fascist right (in other words a fascist propagandist a la FOX). Philby had the ability to write reports that made Spanish fascism seem enlightened, and more importantly invincible, so that it was the better part of valor, no matter what political position a Tory happened to take on the matter of fascism in general, to see the wisdom in supporting this particular fascist – which is to say General Francisco Franco. Even the Tory anti-Nazi maverick Winston Churchill found Philby “…objective, convincing and probably right.” Philby’s dispatches always mentioned Franco’s concern for common people, his perfect credit rating, and the normalcy of life in Falangist controlled parts of Spain, not to mention the always perfect maintenance of law and order.

In 1937, Philby had insisted that only the Cheka’s in-country Iberian chief work with him – to provide him with what he needed to know, and in turn so he could provide what Cheka hit men needed to know to carry out sabotage and killing missions. (Later, after recruitment into MI6, Philby was acting, as far as MI6 was concerned, as chief of his own recruited team of Spanish shooters, eliminating the need to use the double “O”’s* and Philby was paying for it with a generous Cheka budget, although MI6 had no idea. Even so, his 1937-38 “lone wolf” track record in Spain and Portugal provided the cover for him to do the same thing on a larger scale when MI6 would send him back to Iberia as their agent.) It was a “freebee” for London HQ, M* would appreciate, with so many tasks for the double “O”’s to accomplish elsewhere.

Ian Fleming

The MI-6 Chief’s real code-name was “C” not “M”

*Ian Fleming, a former MI6 agent, (and scion of one of Britain’s wealthiest families), and James Bond novels author, so indoctrinated everyone with his terminology I have used it in my new book Red Sword Red Shield after explaining the real terminology. In this case OO [double O] stands for the real term “licensed”, meaning licensed to kill. “M” was actually “C”; and so forth.

SMERSH

On his own and completely without the Cheka’s knowledge, originally provided by Orlov at Molotov’s private direction, Beria’s organization (nominally a special section of the Cheka – SMERSH Russian acronym for “death to spies”) - had secreted a radio system in an invulnerable position and Philby would use it as necessary which would be hardly at all. For his job was not to provide intelligence to the Red Secret Service, but to build his own credentials for a mission still years away. Unless, of course, he should run across information that needed to be provided to Comrade Stalin immediately – thus, the radio direct contact with the Kremlin was available. Cutting out Yezhov, and all of Moscow Center, Philby routinely reported, after 1936, while in Spain, directly to Orlov, and then with Orlov’s 1937 reassignment, to Beria, and Molotov; even directly to Stalin (when exigent circumstances required it.)

Philby needed, to be successful, a constant flow of accurate data about many things Moscow Central did not need to know he knew. This was provided to him on a regular basis by a Spanish librarian, controlled directly by Molotov (which is to say Stalin) with impeccable Spanish aristocratic “cousin” class credentials and absolutely without any Left contacts whatsoever in her own culture. When Stalin wanted Kim to know certain highly sensitive background information, it was provided to her, and via “Moscow rules”, she fed it to him when he appeared at her library. In turn when he asked for specific information she transferred the request on her own radio, and if an answer were forthcoming Philby would pick it up at his next review of the daily Spanish press which was available, on a daily basis, to hundreds of eager readers – of which, to spying eyes, he was only one more.

This SMERSH agent survived and I met her years later in Mexico City, via the good offices of KGB agent Anita Boyer. (Anita was the former wife of Canadian, and Soviet spy, Comrade Boyer who was the first identified, and self-confessed, Soviet Agent in Canada at the end of World War II. In Mexico she was a prominent person in the film industry. – And during this year when Cuban (DGI) and soviet (KGB) intelligence were often at odds, she provided access to the home of Carlos Prieto, to shake it down about me, on the first night I met her. Another story for my autobiography “Idaho Smith’s Search for the Foundation”.)

Stalin Takes Direct Command of Spain

As you can see the situation in Spain was fraught with danger for the international working class movement in general and the USSR in particular. A mistake of any kind, even a seemingly small one, could be disastrous, leading to World War. Worse, a world war with all the cap countries on one side and the USSR and Mongolia on the other.

After the Battle for Madrid stabilized successfully for the Republic, Stalin who had taken direct command of all Spanish operations of the Comintern and placed Orlov in direct command, on the ground, now began a purge of the Cheka’s foreign operations with the aim of making it a more reliable tool.

Stalin knew full well he could not continue to run each of the rapidly increasing number of Orlov super-agents on a personal basis and that meant the Cheka management of its foreign operations had to be brought up to speed. But could the managerial hardware of the Cheka be returned to the same high level it had exhibited under Felix Dzerzhinsky? The answer turned out to be yes, but it was a process rather than a happening, and it started like this:

Inside Snapshot

April, 1937

“Thank you Vlad for filling in.”

Molotov automatically arose from the Boss’s chair and stood to the side waiting to hear the outcome of what had just gone before.

“Fucking Christ. I can’t believe Kalinin was so drunk that he fell down and had to be removed from the stage. Can you imagine how that affected all those school teachers?“

“I’m sure you put it straight.”

“I did but it took all morning. I am glad I went. Only the Army is more important to us than these teachers who have the minds of our youth in their custody. Fortunately, the bullshit propaganda campaign turning me into a super-hero worked to take their minds off of Kalinin – the President of the Soviet Union for Christ’s sake – and onto me. Yes, I got us passed the debacle of that drunk on the stage and as importantly I got a real feel for their problems. They are a loyal and dedicated bunch. They need more money and we have to get it to them.”

“Yes sir. I’ll get on it now. Any specific recommendations?”

“A mountain of them. Poskrebyshev has the book. Molotov, this Kalinin thing cannot happen again. From now on for the rest of his fucking Presidency he will be watched 24 hours a day. The first time he has a drink he will be taken to the Lubyanka.”

“I understand.”

The boss sitting at his desk grabbed a telephone to his right and punched a familiar button.

“Beria. Put the President in a hospital. Not a regular hospital he will intimidate the doctors as soon as he sobers up and wants another bottle and he will leave a place like that. Arrest him. Put him in a rehab and don’t let him out until I say so. Keep me informed.”

“Yes, Koba. Consider it done.”

The boss hung up.

“Now, what were you saying about what happened to Philby?”

“He was detained with his code on tissue paper in his pocket at The Great Admiral Hotel in Cordoba; about thirty kilometers from the Seville Front. He was able to eat it or he would be dead by now. It was just an accident as far as we can determine. An overzealous Franco policeman brought him in, even though he had a right to be there, and had checked ahead of time at Seville with Franco’s cops just to be sure. Anyway, he’s out of pocket, until we can replace his code instructions. Burgess is on his way to Gibraltar now. They’ll connect and eventually he’ll be back on line. In the meantime he’s laying low and doing his job for The Times. We still have our radio contact.

“But, Koba, that’s not all. Yezhov seems to think you want Philby to get close to Franco and kill him.”

“What!”

“I take it you did not authorize Philby assassinating Franco.”

“Of course not.”

 “Yezhov told me that Philby should be instructed to get close to Franco and kill him. He said by your order.”

Stalin threw one of his rather regular fits.

“Where is that little cocksucker?”

“At this precise moment he is in Leningrad.”

“Vlad cancel any orders he may have given to that effect and get that little fucking dwarf here fast – even if you have to arrest him. I cannot believe that that bullshit talk we had about Philby and Franco could be interpreted that way. If he is that stupid he has to go. If he is not stupid then he is a traitor highly placed. What the fuck is going to happen to this country when I die? I can’t believe it. How long would Philby last under torture – 30 minutes?

“He would probably have a heart attack and die before they started.”

“Exactly. - And how long before it comes to my doorstop. Franco assassinated by an irate Spanish worker is one thing – by me quite another. How long before they find out about Philby’s communism?

“Fuck my eyes! What was the dwarf thinking?”

The Boss, on second thought, relieved Molotov of this responsibility and reached for one of his telephones, punching the familiar intercom button..

“Beria, the time may have come. Arrest Yezhov. He is surrounded by armed guards. You now what to do but bring him to my Kremlin office first. I want him ASAP I have to talk to him myself. Then, if necessary…”

“I am already prepared.”

“Lavrenti. Just be sure he is unarmed when he comes to the Kremlin. Otherwise the boys will kill him. I want to talk to him first.”

“Done.”

The Boss hung up and turned to Molotov:

“You have done extremely well Vlad.  You always do extremely well – by far you are the most competent person I have ever known. Now, as you know, it’s time for me to take over directly, meaning Philby’s reports come straight to me through you. Until the Cheka foreign operations are reorganized I want it out of the circuit. You can read Philby’s messages of course but I would prefer, when possible, you do it here in front of me just to be sure there is no delay in any communication, by definition urgent, or I wouldn’t be getting it instantly. – And, of course, keep talking to him on the radio for us.        

“Vlad it’s absolutely imperative that we move our top men up the ladder. War is at best just a few years away. I have to have a man next to M and whoever the British PM happens to be when that time comes. I want you to get him through Spain in one piece, and be sure he is safeguarded to the degree you can. He is going to have to be there for awhile. After all, we don’t know for sure how long this fucking mess in Spain is going to go on. But, I want him there for as long a time as possible. You see it is very likely that the Brit Capitalists are going to end up with their long desired London-Berlin-Rome axis in which case the role of Philby as anti-Soviet anti-Communist chief within MI6 will be absolutely critical. This is the only way we have at the moment anyway to build his prestige in British ruling circles. You know I don’t care what it costs as long as you keep him as safe as possible, actively sending back journalistic pro-fascist dispatches to that idiot Capitalist newspaper. When the time comes for Philby to go back to London we will engineer his recruitment into MI6. History will take care of the rest.”

“Beria is our best man for the Iberian peninsula. Let me suggest that you handle Philby via him.”

“No, Vlad, I’ll handle Philby the way I say. Now, what about Sorge?

La Dona Gloria von Furstenberg and Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler

This night (April 23, 1937) Kim had been invited to a very special private party by La Dona Gloria von Furstenberg, a courtesan highly desired by the fascist perverse, at her villa outside the Falangist temporary front headquarters city of Saragossa. Gloria’s soiree was arranged this night for luminaries of the Nazi and Italian delegations to Franco’s insurgent Regime. She had told him she expected Nazi Reichsfurher Heinrich Himmler to make a personal appearance and urged him to attend. She considered she was doing Kim a favor, as a correspondent who could be counted upon to put the right spin on things, if and when, Himmler’s appearance in Spain should become noticed elsewhere by the foreign press - most of whom she considered to be de facto under the influence of Bolshevism.

Kim had NKVD’s “background” on Gloria. He knew she was originally a Mexican prostitute who had become quite successful with wealthy men before she was fifteen years old, and now was quite wealthy herself, having acquired high status in international sexually decadent fascist circles. The song “Gloria” pretty much sums up Gloria’s youthful career in Mexico.

All of this might turn out to be of interest to a run-of-the-mill spy. But, in Philby’s mind not sufficiently important to take any chances on having to transmit wireless communications to Moscow. So in fact, he was not looking forward to this dinner party and had already decided to make himself a less desirable conversational partner by getting drunk. A not altogether unpleasant thought in itself. Something that made his work enjoyable if the truth were told...

On his mind at the moment was his planned visit to the Front with key Front generals in charge of the upcoming offensive from the Fascist salient at Saragossa. Although he would go, to present himself to the leading luminaries of international Nazism as a person of positive interest, perhaps useful to them in the future.

 Attending he found that the rumors about Gloria were understated. Everywhere there were what then were called “female impersonators” who in actuality were highly feminized males. Men with breasts and large buttocks both enlarged by hormone treatments. Surgically advanced in their profession via the removal of one or more floating ribs to give a wasp figure and of course larger breasts. Dressed accordingly as tempting courtesans they acted as the servants and choreographers of pleasure. – And, as Philby was trying to tie himself to an actual woman – in this case Gloria herself – he came face to face with Heinrich Himmler the person who had been designated of positive interest to him by his hostess.

Spilling the Beans: The Importance of Being Earnest

Philby and Himmler

“We hope that some arrangement may be reached in the not too distant future with your government to join us in the holy war against Bolshevism”

Kim responded with “I believe we are trying in The Hague to accommodate that desire.”

An accord without Hitler. The British rulers had their outright Nazi’s but its majority wanted something other than a poor-White-trash nincompoop at the head of Germany before they would willingly follow a German military adventure against Russia. Class was too important here. Fundamentally, in their eyes, Hitler was just another Cromwell. They had barely survived him. After all Hitler had not hesitated to duplicate Bolshevik propaganda against the rich (albeit deflecting it against rich Jews) and against their Parliamentary form of resolving problems among themselves. A German Cromwell some said. They were not about to panic to the point of cutting their own throats via a lunatic semi-socialist like Hitler just to get at Stalin.

Accordingly, Baldwin had dispatched secret agents to The Hague led by MI6 ‘double “O” men’ Stevens and Best to organize Hitler’s assassination and substitution by a “responsible” German capitalist leader. Philby had been made aware of this by Orlov. There had to be a responsible German at the head of German State and Government for the Brits to go along. But, so far, the Baldwin initiative via his team in The Hague, to kill Hitler and substitute such a “responsible” German ruling class leader had been fruitless.

But the negotiations had not been broken off. In fact, if he could read between the lines of the Reichsfuhrer’s statements the negotiations were not only on-going but might well produce positive results. Himmler took Philby’s comment as evidence of his “high connected family” (e.g., St. John Philby) knowledge and sympathy. A serious error as it turned out.

“Time will tell Mr. Philby what is possible. I know, what some of my countrymen do not, that your Prime Minister is one of us anti-Bolsheviks and he simply wants a change in our leadership, for obvious reasons, before we come together in common cause – a military final solution - against Bolshevism. I have heard many good things about you. We would like you to help us build a bridge of friendship in Britain once this mess in Spain is wrapped up.”

“I will do my best…” at which point Gloria took the Reichsfurher by the arm saying “Don Himmler, I want you to meet someone or other…” and off they went. It had been a rewarding evening after all because Himmler had admitted that he knew about and therefore that he was involved in the secret dealings between the British PM and other high Reich officials against Hitler!”

Kim managed to extricate himself early and spent the rest of the evening sobering up; approaching, activating and using his direct contact with “the Boss.” That night he told Stalin what he had uncovered. (The radio call came in right after Stalin began his five hour nightly sleep and he had to be woken up.) It was worth it. Philby told him Hitler’s hand-picked secret police boss was in actuality already conspiring against him (Hitler) with personal representatives of the British Prime Minister. Furthermore, their objective would be, if this actually came to pass, a common war against the USSR!

Humility

Some of our heroes I knew personally. Abraham Lincoln Battalion veteran Steve Nelson, who became my mentor in Oregon in 1963-1964, as I have recounted herein and in my autobiography (Idaho Smith’s Search for the Foundation Volume I The Buccaneer – go to World Cat for a library near you), was one of the first. Another, Dan Bonnel, a professor of Botany at Boise (Idaho) Junior College who told me in 1962 about executing Italian fascists (in 1937) before breakfast. Then it was in Los Angeles while helping Frank Pestana (1973-1974) I first met veterans Alvah Bessie and Irv Goff, among others. When around these men I always felt somewhat in awe as a young man, as I have described in my autobiography. Nor do only communists feel this way; for example, James A. Michener later lamented his failure to join them when he should have, and no greater popularizer of democratic history exists in our country than Michener.

Warning! Be Alert!

All of these men would turn in their grave if they could see how the FBI got control of their Party under the traitor and paid FBI career penetration Special Agent Sam Webb. This phony “Party” is on its death bed and shortly will be in the ground.

For those of you young people just learning the ropes let me say the rest of the outfit that inherited the name CPUSA is not made up of communists but of people who comprise a kind of right wing deviation known throughout the world as modern revisionism. Their sponsors were the old Soviet leadership in the USSR and East Europe. In the USA now they fit in the center of the Obama Democratic Party which is where their leaders should go (but then they would lose their Party incomes.) They got the name through historical happenstance as you will have learned herein (at least in part) and that is all that remains of their communist origins. The real communists in the USA are elsewhere as for example here with the Communist Party USA (Foundation).

Anthropology – Elman Service

One of the two most important Marxist cultural anthropologists of our time, Elman Service got his baptism of fire in the Spanish civil war. He passed away in 1996 – sixty years after he volunteered to fight Fascism in Spain with us. Immediately upon his return to the US he headed for the University of Michigan where he would spend the rest of his life. There he wrote many of the most important anthropological theoretical treatises and ethnological compilations (e.g., Profiles in Ethnology) of the 20th century. Service stayed faithful and true to Marxism throughout his life and was a great inspiration to me and for my own theoretical work long before I realized he was an Abraham Lincoln Battalion veteran. (The other most important Marxist cultural anthropologist being Marshall Sahlins I have mentioned before several times because of his work, especially Stone Age Economics.)

1936

Spain was a war in which Bolshevism had nothing to gain. Except, of course, to have another de facto “Third World” country in the Socialist orbit. But that is all it would have been - Socialism, once again, essentially in name only. A poverty stricken peasant country at an even lower level of development than Russia before Bolshevism. Spanish workers would either have to duplicate the Soviet effort at bootstrapping into the 20th century industrial world or wait for the Russian workers to send them the machinery and factories they would need. The Soviet Union didn’t have any extra factories or equipment. It had had to sacrifice everything to modernize as it was. Stalin wouldn’t have had to pursue the course he was pursuing if the Soviets had anything extra.

Furthermore, Stalin was confronting an inevitable two-front war at that moment. Japan on his eastern frontier and the Baldwin-Chamberlain plan for a London-Berlin-Rome axis on his western one. Even if Spain were to Bolshevize and do everything perfectly (a mirror image of what was then occurring) it would be a third, and impossible to service, front, given the geographical facts of life.

In short, Spain was never anything but a pain-in-the-ass for us. But, it was one we had to confront and Stalin did his best to help the Spaniards, who were their own worst enemy, when it came to doing the right thing.

Why a pain-in-the-ass? Because, besides the obvious inability of Spanish workers to do anything to contribute other than maybe holding on to their momentary gains, the (1) left wing of the Comintern, not to mention (2) “independent” socialists (largely British with some quasi-Trotskyists under their leader Andres Nin, Trotsky’s former personal secretary, organized as the POUM in Spain), and (3) the real Trotskyists, were demanding that the Soviet Union join in an international effort to save the Spanish Republic and indeed to spread revolutionary socialist politics to that country.

A more backward part of Europe probably did not exist when the fascist Army officer’s revolt began July 17th, 1936, as far as working class preparation was concerned. This fatal flaw would soon become apparent as the Civil War unfolded. – And, the most fatal flaw of all being the large number of farmers under the influence of Anarchism to which the Stalinist model of the future was anathema. In other words, Bolshevism in 1936 Spain did not have the same kind of farmers as it had had in Czarist Russia in 1917.

For the Soviet Union to intervene directly is exactly what Hitler and Baldwin and Chamberlain wanted. It would terrify the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie in the UK and France and prepare the basis for a London-Berlin-Rome axis which would then attack the USSR! This was the objective fact. It was the center of British and French Foreign policy from 1933 to 1941. Furthermore it was the reason Stalin was right in describing Trotsky as an objective ally and agent of Hitler.

What to do?

As we have seen, in that instance Stalin sent “International Brigades,” composed often of bourgeois youth from neighboring countries with democratic (anti-fascist) inclinations and many communist youth as well. In fact, the communist youth were the backbone and mainstay of the International Brigades, organized by the Yugoslav Joseph Broz (and later Marshall) Tito operating then out of Paris under the direct supervision of the Boss. – And, another of Stalin’s favorites, a hero of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, Andre Marty. Stalin sent Marty to take command of Comintern troops at Albacete, Spain, in 1936. Marty had become world-famous when he led the French sailors mutiny that ended the French attempt to intervene in the Russian Civil War, specifically to save White Crimea. Instead Marty had turned the French Fleet against the French Capitalist Government!

These “Internationalists” saved the day for the Republic and gained Stalin considerable respect, as illustrated by the success of Ernest Hemingway’s book For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway’s hero in this novel was Robert Jordan based on the US communist Robert Merriman who was the first combat commander of the American volunteers organized into the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the XVth International Brigade when it went into combat against the fascists in the Battle for Madrid in February 1937. It was well known to the entire world that Hemingway and his future wife, Martha Gellhorn, were strong supporters of the Republic and of the International Brigades in particular. Hemingway’s and Gellhorn’s, non-communist status helped the United Front way of fighting for the Popular Front government immensely.

1937 Spanish Gold

Along the way, as he anticipated, the Boss managed to get his hands on the (788 tons of) Treasury gold of the Spanish Republic and Orlov managed its movement to the Mediterranean and loaded all of it on disguised Soviet ships. That money helped the industrialization drive in the USSR, immensely. When the gold arrived in Odessa with Orlov sitting on top of it, Orlov was called to Moscow by the Boss for a new assignment. An assignment to the USA which would affect the future of the entire world as it turned out. So, Stalin proved again, much as would Fidel Castro decades later, that the best laid plans of the smartest imperialist leaders can be defeated - time and time again.

Inside Snapshot

Strange Bedfellows

May 1, 1937

The Boss was waiting to walk onto Lenin’s Mausoleum podium. The May 1st Parade beginning.

“Those double O men, Vlad, what caliber are they?” Asked the Boss.

“Burgess says they are the best hitters M has.”

”I hate to say it but we may have to intervene just to be sure they don’t succeed.”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking the same thing since Philby radioed Himmler’s conversation with him… But it’s going to be tricky.”

“These are the elements as I see them. We can’t tell Hitler who spilled the beans about the Brit hitters in The Hague. If he were to confront Himmler that low-life would remember his talk with Philby and that would be the end of Philby. This should come to Hitler as a favor from me. Those two hitters are in The Hague at Baldwin’s order and this Hitler will find to be absolutely true. This should be done in such a way that Hitler will conclude it was that idiot (Admiral - ed) Canaris. If this is done the right way Hitler could interpret this as a signal we will not make his regime our number one enemy in Europe - if he doesn’t force us into such a posture - and we would like to continue our de facto German alliance we got with the Rapallo treaty.

Stalin Helping Himself, Rather Cleverly

 “Otherwise, I am going to choke off all of our oil shipments to their Reich within seven days – permanently – then they can continue to negotiate with us over other economic decisions, but no more oil. Which is really what I want. They will not agree, you see, and that is what I want. But, they should think they brought this on themselves Vlad. You see? I need that oil now for our own coal-iron-steel complexes behind the Urals About which they know nothing, and I don’t want them to know anything, so this should be presented as a tit for tat.”

“Now that’s a good idea. Turn the cap plot against them. Get a lot more resources for our behind the Urals industrialization, without them thinking it is anything but political. I just didn’t anticipate we could do it by helping Hitler. Anyway, we can pepper the report with so much stuff that could only have come from the Red Orchestra Hitler will assume Canaris’ office to be the source. Another one of our Red Orchestra spies about whom they are already over impressed.”

“Hitler should use his own personal SS detachment to check out the info about Stevens and Best in The Hague – not the Gestapo or SD - and we can only hope he decides to have them killed. That should put an end to the Baldwin plot for 1937. Even if they escape. No matter what the outcome, this should discourage Baldwin from trying anything like constructing their London-Berlin-Rome axis again right away, at least in the same way. With Hitler on his guard the Brits will have to figure out something else. Whether this is a win, loss or a draw becomes irrelevant. We will have prevented an easy victory for them in this skirmish. Take care of it Vlad and keep me posted step by step. Use Beria and keep the Cheka out of it.”

“Consider it done.”

- And as an historical note Hitler did decide to eliminate the conspirators.

Inside Snapshot

June 10, 1937

Which Military Line? The Tukhachevsky Affair

“Have you decided?”

“Yes, unfortunately, the situation is really tight, but I have no choice. I have decided after all of these tests in Spain we have the financial and industrial resources to develop enough planes and tanks but only of a few types. Tukhachevsky and gang are wrong about the entire thing. The main thing we must have, that I need, are 20,000 aerial tanks and 20,000 land tanks, better than any the capitalists have or can build in the same time period. With this, and the right Army personnel, we can win the inevitable world war about to begin. The rest of this stuff of theirs is way too complicated for an Army of the kind we can field at this time. But, they can’t understand that. – And, they want to build toward a first strike as the final strike capability only, and right now, and that will not work. If the first strike were to fail what would we then do? We know from our own civil war experience what we need, and now from our detailed reports on our equipment in Spain I know exactly what we can do and thereby how we can win, in the upcoming fight.

“By the way I think this first fight may come in Mongolia based on what Sorge is telling me. I want my tanks and my planes ready for that fight or whichever comes first. It’s time to force the military reorganization issue and then the military-industrial complex reorganization.          “Is Beria Ready?”

“He’s ready. Will the Politburo authorize this?

“That’s my job and I am going to do it now. As I said I don’t want you there as I want it clear I respect all of my colleagues and am not trying to stack the deck with votes which we easily could. It is this information and cover letter from (Czechoslovak) President Benes about the Tukhachevsky plot that will carry the day or it will not. On top of all the data so far accumulated by SMERSH (Beria) I think they will agree and we will have prevailed without several votes they would have considered automatic for my side. Anyway, it is either or now. Wish me luck.”

The boss walked out of his Kremlin office to meet with the Politburo on the key question of the arrest of Marshall Tukhachevsky and fellow co-conspirators. On this meeting the history of the world would depend.

The Truth about Numbers

One of the most important arrows in the capitalist (and Trotskyist) quiver of “anti-Stalin” projectiles is the one that Stalin was jealous and/or frightened of Red Army generals, like Tuckhachevsky, and also being psychopathically paranoid he ordered the execution of some 40,000 Red Army officers! This is a complete and total lie invented from whole cloth by Trotsky in exile and picked up by the hack writers of the chief imperialist propagandists, including and especially, Robert Payne and Robert Conrad. Allowed to stand unchallenged this total lie then leads the same people to conclude that the reason the Nazi’s did as well as they did in the first five months of the war in 1941 is because all the competent commanders had been executed by Stalin with some 40,000 having only been at their jobs for less than 4 years at most.

We now have the records from official Russian sources which all historians, as far as I know, agree are authentic. What do these records have to say about the number of Red Army officers arrested, sentenced (including those shot) and rehabilitated?

We know that in February of 1937 the Red Army officer corps numbered 206,000, for a total Red Army size of 1,100,000. In fact, 40,000 of this 206,000 total is 19.4 % of the total. If this is true how did it happen that on June 22, 1941, that over half of the Red Army officers had less than one years’ experience on the job?

This 40,000 figure was derived from 1954 statistics presented to the Party by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. The figure was derived from the 1937 figure for numbers of the Red Army dismissed which were 20,643 and the 1938 figure for numbers of the Red Army soldiery dismissed which were 16,118. A total of 36,761. Rounded off he got 40,000.

The problem lies not with the figures but with the definitions and assumptive definitions. For example some men are dismissed for X others Y and still others Z reasons. Only a small fraction of those dismissed are dismissed by execution. The Trotskyist and Imperialist propagandist made the completely unjustified assumption that dismissal was equivalent to execution! The truth is,

Of the 36,761 dismissed some 10,868m were arrested. Of those arrested only 1,654 were executed or died in prison prior to trial. Let’s say it again: the so-called Stalin shooting purge of the military to the tune of 40,000 men turns out to be 1,654 executed. You cadre should take note of the gross lies our people have been taught and the utility of checking every single “fact” these “historians” try to palm off on you. Don’t trust anyone. Check every single thing.

1938

In my frank opinion, in the end we were far better off not having this distraction (Spain) in the way, than we would have been with a permanent Government of Beggars in Madrid, which is what any Spanish Left Government would have ended up being. It was almost 1939 and the time had come to get serious. Stalin confronted the probability of a two front war (one against Japan and another against Germany-England-France-Italy) and certainly did not need a third front in Spain. We had given Spain our best shot and we were insufficient. Probably just as well as it ended up in 1939.

International Brigades Withdrawn

It was clear; England and France were going all the way in selling out democracy in continental Europe when they signed the give away of Czechoslovakia to Hitler on September 30th, 1938. Both the British and French regimes were fully committed to urging Hitler to war against the USSR and would pull out all the stops.

Stalin decided the newest position in 1938 of the Spanish Republican boobs to ask all foreign volunteers to leave Spain and throw the Republican cause onto the mercy of England and France was an excellent excuse to disengage Soviet and Comintern forces and he gave the order instantly the moment Chamberlain signed away Czechoslovakia September 30, 1938. One month later on October 29th, 1938, the Internationals made a farewell march through Barcelona and they were gone! As were Soviet tank crews and pilots.

Stalin had done his best to help every step of the way and even at the end, in January 1939, when they had no remaining credit, sent the Republican government over $100 million in arms. This even after he knew they would be defeated in 1939 (Franco declared victory on April 1, 1939.) An old revolutionary himself Stalin found it emotionally impossible to leave these incompetents to their own well deserved end without given them every possible option to win. The arms were shipped but most of the ships were stopped by the French before they could discharge their cargos. The British and French capitalist regimes decided to recognize the Franco insurgent government (then headquartered at Burgos) on February 27th, 1939, abandoning the last of the embattled continental European democracies to fascism. The US recognized Franco on April 1, 1939 sealing the deal and on that day Franco declared the Civil War over.

The beginning of the long period of retribution authorized by Franco’s First Law of Political Responsibilities got underway. This was the Gestapo type of authorization to search for and kill all those who had opposed Franco.

Hundreds of thousands of people ran for the French Border and political asylum in the USSR and Mexico. The only two countries to consistently support the Republic before and after its defeat (where in Mexico City, after the 1939 defeat, the Spanish Left and its Government in exile eventually concentrated. When I arrived in Mexico City, twenty three years later, at the end of August, 1962, I met many of the Republic’s then remaining officials.)

Inside Snapshot

The Longest Shot: Orlov to FDR

August 21, 1938

“Koba, this is for you. Yezhov’s hands were trembling when he handed it to me. He said ‘for your eyes only.’ It’s from Orlov.”

“If that fucking dwarf has fucked this up too, this will be his last day... Let me have it.”

The boss read the letter once, then again. Then a third time. Vyacheslav Molotov knew what this meant. The Boss wasn’t yelling so Orlov must have sent some relatively good news.

Actually they had known for several weeks that their top spy-master for Western Europe, Leiba Lazaravich Feldbin, code named Alexander Orlov, had defected. But to whom and for what reward was still unknown. The Boss “said” he believed that Orlov would not defect “all the way”, that he was just trying to protect himself from the murderous machinations of the secret police chief Yezhov.

Molotov already knew Yezhov was going to go the way of his predecessor Yagoda and his underlings. Koba had been extremely angry – the only reason Yezhov was still alive, was because the Boss hadn’t gotten to the bottom of the mess in Western European NKVD operations. Molotov knew that Joseph Stalin had been pinning great hopes on the intelligence he expected certain Cheka agents and their apparats to provide during the coming World War, now so close. Between Philby, the other Orlov spies in England, the Red Orchestra in Germany; especially Richard Sorge and his apparat of spies operating in Germany, China and Japan, the Boss had had all his bases covered until this. Until the Boss said the dwarf fucked everything up. Dwarf was Stalin’s pejorative for Yezhov, head of NKVD domestic and foreign operations.

“You can read it. Here.”

The Boss handed Molotov the letter written by Orlov in his own hand and delivered by special courier from New York via the Soviet embassy in Paris. They had been waiting for it since receiving a cable from Paris that it had arrived.

 “In short, he says he is still with us ideologically and always will be and will go to the grave with his secrets if ‘I’ leave him alone. Otherwise he will give everything he knows to the Americans and he has sent along a list of agents he ran in Europe for me to see and confirm with Yezhov. His lawyer has a copy and if anything happens to him it will all go to the FBI. Vlad, we will leave him alone, and hope for the best.”

“I don’t believe a word of it Koba.”

“Why don’t you believe it?”

“Orlov would drink lye before he would betray us. Betray you. You don’t have to comment on this but I think you sent him on some mission.”

The Boss said nothing at first then continued as if Molotov had said nothing.

“Get Beria in here. It’s time to put the new intelligence reorganization in place. That little cocksucker Yezhov has fucked me in the ass for the last time. This is all his fault. Just like he has fucked-up the Bukharin trial. All he had to do was to get Bukharin to admit to what he has already admitted to Sergo, Klima and other comrade’s years ago. But, no, he had to create more Trotskyite conspiracies and you know what happened. Not to mention the stupidity of even considering using Philby to kill Franco. I should have shot the Dwarf myself then. I must be getting soft.

“- And, Vlad, keep your thoughts to yourself.”

“What thoughts?”

Beria appeared instantly. “Yes Koba?”

“This time Yezhov has to go. You know what to do. You’re taking over.

“Thank you Koba.”

“Your welcome. Now look, many of our foreign operations have been all fucked-up since Felix died, what ten years ago, and gotten worse with each subsequent chief. Mezh did his best but he started out losing the MOCRists - not that I gave a shit as you know (laughing), but it was symptomatic of what was to come. First that asshole Yagoda and now Yezhov. I want you to put permanent order into Cheka abroad. Can you do that for me?

“Yes Koba I can and I will. I have been giving this a lot of thought. I know what to do and to begin with we need to put our European networks at ease. Orlov says Yezhov has scared the shit out of a lot of people and discouraged just about everybody else with his terrible personal attitudes. I’ll take care of it and get this problem off of your shoulders.”

“You’re a good man Beria. I know you can do this. I remember how well you ran our intelligence operations in the Trans-caucuses in the old days. – And, last but certainly not least, you worked hand in glove with Orlov and his wife Maria Rodontslov, fighting the counter-revolutionaries in the Caucuses, what for two years?”

“Yes. I better go get Yezhov myself. Is there anything more?”

“No, that will do it. But, come to the Kremlin movie room tonight. Thank you Comrade.”

Yezhov was replaced. Beria did take over and stayed intelligence boss until Stalin’s death. With Lavrenti Beria Stalin finally had his replacement for his good friend and reliable secret police Chief Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Orlov’s demand was carefully honored. In fact, Orlov’s old friend Beria (and new controller) was charged with sending him money and he maintained a highly secret radio contact with Orlov on a regular basis. To any Party person who might learn of the situation Stalin was simply committed to honoring a personal understanding. Yet, it was always a matter of historical record, Orlov never talked. (The “understanding” misunderstood abroad.)

Why?

Because as Molotov instantly guessed the Boss had sent Orlov on a mission. This time to bring the USA into the inevitable coming war on the right side. A mission so secret and so well funded, originally only two men in the world knew about it. The Boss and Orlov. But if Orlov’s true location were known then others could figure out the same thing; others like Nazi intelligence, Italian fascist intelligence, Japanese military intelligence, and so forth. Among communists and for many years, only Molotov and Beria were in on the secret.

Understanding the Intelligence Reorganization in Western Europe

Within a year things would be back to normal in Western Europe as far as Red intelligence was concerned. But it would take Beria a year to do it. It would not be until after Hitler marched into Poland on the 1st of September 1939, and Britain and France declared war on the 3rd, (after much soul searching for they had spent the same year trying to be sure that the Baldwin-Chamberlain plot to form a London-Berlin-Rome axis was successful) that Stalin would feel comfortable with the clean-up, ordering his new West European spy-master Pave A. Sudoplatov to reactivate Orlov’s agents.

Meanwhile, Philby heard bits and pieces and gathered that Orlov had been reassigned but spent the year more-or-less on his own, building his ties in every conceivable way to MI6. Finally, thanks to his own efforts, and the efforts of always loyal and reliable, on the job, never discouraged, Guy Burgess, the MI6 contact came. Philby was recruited. Simultaneously his, to be, new (4th) Soviet controller A.V. Gorski, was selected in Moscow by the Boss, Molotov, Beria and Sudoplatov. Accordingly, Orlov’s Moscow spy-master replacement, Sudoplatov, sent his top London Embassy agent (Gorski) to Philby et. al., once again.  Stalin’s decision a fortuitous, if perfectly timed, circumstance for Philby and for the Soviet Union.

It would be a half century before it was known to anyone other than the Boss and Molotov that the prodding for help from MI6 came from the top Soviet agent in MI5.        This prodding from London was the immediate cause, the trigger if you will, that led to Sudoplatov re-establishing operational contact with Philby, et. al. This had been done at Sudoplatov’s instruction, with Stalin’s approval, because of this entirely separate recruit (from the Cheka). Namely, a “China” recruit of the Red Army’s intelligence division, who had become a high ranking officer in Britain’s internal Security service.

Dzerzhinsky had decided, in order to prevent duplication and tripping over one another, this agent and his group had originally to be inserted into the other half of the British secret service (the internal Security Service) MI5.

NKVD (Cheka) had known nothing of this Red Army G2 operation inside the British Security Service (MI5) [e.g. Cairncross and Hollis, not to mention the Duchess of Windsor.] The Cheka’s operation was focused on SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, which is where they (the Cheka) operated Philby, Burgess, MacLean, Straight and Blunt].

These other spies (in Britain’s internal Security Service or MI 5) had been recruited by Red Army G2 in China. Their number one was named Roger Hollis. Hollis was asking that what support could be roused from MI6, be so roused, and coordinated with his own work in MI5. The objective? Hunt down and kill Nazi spies operating in Great Britain with foreign controllers.

Keystone Cops, Charlie Chaplin and John Dillinger

Reflections on Felix Dzerzhinsky

The Boss had no life outside of the Party life he had chosen. So, for personal recreation he often relaxed with his closest friends and associates after midnight and before 5:00 a.m. Moscow Time, in the Kremlin movie room. (The Boss slept from 5:00 am to 10:00 am every day; as did, consequently, all of  his generals and admirals.) This night Stalin and Beria were sitting next to each other because the Boss wanted to talk with him during the Intermission.

“Lav I laughed so hard at those Keystone Cops I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”

“I noticed. But, you need this Koba. I don’t know how you do it. Thirty years now day and night and how often do you sleep? I know. Five hours a night. Otherwise you are at the job all day and night every day of the year. The people know it and the Party knows it. We admire you but worry about you. It’s good to laugh and the American’s do make the best movies and newsreels, no doubt about that.”

“I can’t believe it. Chaplin makes fun of Hitler, the Keystone Cops illustrate the inadequacy of the American police, and John Dillinger makes an absolute ass of all of them.

“Anyway Lav I wanted to talk to you about this mess in the Cheka’s foreign operations.”

“I have the situation in hand Koba, don’t worry.”

“I know you do. As usual you are doing an absolutely superb job. But here is the point. This is my fault at-bottom. You see I should have paid the closest attention to the Cheka when Felix died but I did not. I assumed that the wonderful organization he had in place would simply evolve naturally as such bureaus always do and that his handpicked men would succeed him and do as he had done. But, in practice, it turns out that Mezh, for example, was good precisely because he was methodical not because he had Felix’ unerring ability to find enemies and get his hands around their throats personally.

“What I did not sufficiently realize was that in fact the reason the Cheka worked so well is because Felix provided all the ideological drive necessary to kill our enemies and men like Mezh cleaned up the bureaucratic mess behind him.”

“You’re right about Felix. He could not wait to actually get his hands around the throats of our enemies and he did a fucking good job at killing them – all. I liked the meat in the stew test – remember – in the Civil War he told the Chekists to go into the kitchen of suspect farmers and check the stew. If there was meat in it shoot them!

“Koba, I went with him to the Ukraine in 1918 to liquidate the Anarchist army. He was to get the Ukrainian Chekists to root out the hidden Black Hundreds which were everywhere in the Ukraine and Byelorussia as you know. The first day I finished early with the Army men and went to meet him so I heard his talk. Koba I never heard anything like it. He made my blood run cold. Me!

“He told them ‘…you are here because you are Jews like me and you know what these evil creatures do. I saw them rape and murder my mother and my sisters and draw and quarter my father when I was ten years old. I picked the rest of you because you are from these parts of the old Empire and you know without me having to tell you what they are and what we owe to them. Besides we are also Bolsheviks and we need to liquidate them for that reason too. You are being given lists.

“Kill everyone on these lists and their families and round up and shoot their friends too, and their families, or if you are feeling exceptionally kindly send the latter to prison. Do not even think of coming back here alive if you fail in any way to carry out your instructions because if you should have such audacity I will personally blow your fucking head off. Now do you understand me?”

“Amazingly Koba they stood and cheered. We never had to worry once we unleashed Felix on an enemy.”

“Lav, do you remember after Illych was shot (1918) and Felix took over all police work the crime rate went to fucking zero. He rounded up all those displaced kids and sent them to Army Komosomal camps. Many are now our leading cadre. So, anyway, guys like Yagoda made their way to the top after Mezh passed. Then this asshole Yezhov. I should have appointed you when Felix died. – And, we are now paying the price for my mistake.

“What can we learn from this?”

“What do you think you have learned from this Koba?”

“Illych (Lenin) used to worry about this generation – us Old Bolsheviks – standing in the way of the new generation at precisely the time we need to admit we will need this generation and perhaps one or two more to do the job of getting the Soviet Republic ready to lead a global socialist revolution. I had hoped the Cheka would play a role in being sure that did not happen.

“Instead I let the Cheka fall under the direction of a new generation of opportunists. This is not a new generation of Bolsheviks but a new generation of evil, self-aggrandizing, under-cover capitalist agents. Yagoda and now Yezhov are examples. For the moment we will go back to Old Bolsheviks – namely you – but we need to be trying to create a new generation of fanatical true believing Bolshevik secret policemen. If we can’t do that we will fail.”

“Thank you for your thoughts Koba. That’s pretty deep. I need time to think about what you have said. Alright?”

“Of course. That’s why these informal movie get-togethers are so important. Perhaps I am all fucked up on this. Let me know what you think when you are ready. Now it looks like they are ready for the Chaplain movie.”

Summing It Up

All that having been said, what if anything did we get out of that “Spanish Shithole.” Which is what David Alfaro Siqueros (Commander of the Mexican and other Latin American volunteers) told me, the day he was released from prison in Mexico City, in 1965, as the phrase used by Comrade “K” (to him [Siqueros] when he gave him the order to put the Latinos together and go back to Mexico.) Comrade K was Stalin’s in-coming hand-picked chief of Cheka intelligence for Spain under Franco. Comrade K was a Polish comrade who entered Spain under the incoming Franco regime, as a businessman. I have code-named this agent as Comrade “K” – I have kept the name secret because of his daughters who are still alive – Ed. See Book 1 of my autobiographical series for the setting and details of these conversations.

The answer is we got more than we expected to get given the disaster caused by ultra-leftism in Spain and its supporters around the globe. Namely, 788 tons of gold, Soviet troops transported to waiting ships disguised as trade freighters. It was Orlov’s last critical task in Spain before being called for New York, and is a fascinating story in and of itself. However our point is that with 788 tons of gold any world class financier (such as Joseph Stalin) could have built ten brand new steel factory complexes that would make Pittsburgh choke in amazement. Frankly, that in and of itself would have made our intervention in that chaotic fight worth it. (Note: Stalin did use it to finish the Soviet Steel industry which by 1941 was producing more than anyone else in the world!)

In addition we got invaluable training in regular and guerrilla warfare of every type, essential as time would prove, in many revolutionary struggles across the globe. (e.g., Tito used the men who survived the Spanish War he had channeled to Spain from Yugoslavia and East Europe to become his cadre in his National Liberation Army for Yugoslavia during World War II. One of these officers (Alberto Bayo), expert in guerilla warfare, Fidel Castro hired to teach guerilla warfare to his men in Mexico, before they departed to start the Revolutionary War in Cuba, December 1956. Che Guevara graduated number one in that course, despite the fact he was there as the 26th of July Movement’s medic!)

And continuing as a matter of interest to me as well is why Colonel Alberto Bayo Giraud, the Cuban originating trainer who fought Franco in Spain and Gringo stooge Anastasio Somoza later, had a falling out with Fidel, at some point before the Cubans departed Mexico to land in Cuba. My guess is that Bayo, like so many others, who would make the same mistake in the future, thought he knew better than Fidel about how to conduct the Cuban Revolution; and like so many after him, who failed to see Fidel’s unerring accuracy as a commander-in-chief of the Cuban Revolution, found they had parted ways. (Even Che Guevara said later his only mistake had been in not initially understanding Fidel Castro’s perfect accuracy in determining the course of the Cuban Revolution. Something he corrected early on, he said, and was thereafter unswervingly loyal to the Commandante.)

– And, finally, a small army (tens of thousands) of agents for the Cheka who could and would be used everywhere in the world where “volunteers” were needed by the Party and its Sword and Shield. (It was Lenin who first described the Cheka as the Sword and Shield of the Proletarian Revolution.) One of my favorites was a US pilot who flew for Galen in China and later for us, not only in Spain but in many other “quiet” wars. Another story for a book yet to come. Another, the Spanish veteran Ramon Mercader, the assassin of Trotsky, operating under the orders of the Cheka chief for the Western Hemisphere; a Chekist who has subsequently told all the details in his autobiography.       

Note the Cheka’s continued use of people such as Ramon Mercader who had personal experience reasons for hating the enemies the Bolsheviks confronted anywhere anytime. In this case the assassin was a Spanish veteran with a deep hatred of Trotsky because of the counter-revolutionary role he believed Trotsky’s gang played in Spain, especially in their revolt in Barcelona during the critical battle for Madrid (November 1936 – March 1937), which was very harmful in many ways.

Finally, for us specifically in the USA, the war in Spain helped the CPUSA immensely in propaganda terms. Party writers correctly squeezed every drop of Press “goodness and heroism” out of the actions of its fighters in Spain who were the overwhelming majority of the US contingent and the Party’s membership expanded exponentially after 1936. North American communists had taken on a new and heroic image in the minds of the masses because of their leading the fight in Spain.

In short, our intervention in Spain turned out quite well in every respect for us at home and many other revolutionary movements in other countries as well. Losing the war was the fault of the Republican government in Spain. A bigger bunch of incompetent boobs than the Spanish Republican Government probably never existed in 20th century Europe. Despite every imaginable attempt at creating an effective officer corps, and technical arm, even the self-sacrificing Internationalists could not save the Spanish Republicans from themselves.

Internationalism, Spain and Steve Nelson

Among the “givens” or fundamental premises of the Marxist theory of capitalism is that the capitalists always have the entire world as their market, and source of cheap labor, not just the nation(s) in which they exist and run their factories. This flows logically from the fact of assembly line production of standardized parts enabling the most ignorant untrained farmer to participate in manufacturing the most complex capitalist machinery and the concomitant that anyone anywhere will do.

Accordingly, the working class response – as a class – is to confront the capitalists as a world-wide class. In practical terms this means workers in a fight in one country should be able to call upon workers in other countries to assist them since the fight of one is ultimately the fight of all. It is this (i) sharing of funds and other (ii) similar support (killing and maiming would-be scabs from continental origins) which brought the labor aristocrats of England and Germany together with Marx in the First International.

The capitalists were already organized with their Governments in place and most importantly with their State (military and police) in place. This was and is for that matter the basis of organization of all capitalist societies. Remember the golden rule: labor discipline not based on force in any class society is impossible. In short, their system of governance (whatever governing “form” that may have been or may be now or may be in the future) and their labor discipline has only one fundamental objective and that is forcing workers to accept wage slavery or suffer the consequences. These consequences being torture, prison, assassination, execution, isolation, deportation and every form of persecution imaginable in civil society.

Historically, our organized response as Bolsheviks began with the First International of Workingmen of which Karl Marx became the General Secretary. It was preceded by “trade unionism” in various forms including its most sophisticated political adventures such as British Chartism and various political parties of trade unions in the New Republic (USA from 1819 to 1861 – see Part III below).

What Steve Taught Me

Steve Nelson taught me a great deal. In this subject matter (we are currently discussing), Steve put it to me the way I am recalling it as a lesson plan in the following several pages. In the retrospective view of five decades I can only say it is a worthwhile approach, but not the only way of categorizing these years, even from our perspective. On the other hand what Steve taught me does deal with critical issues in an acceptable (believable) manner and is, therefore, worth your attention now.

The Practical Problem of the First Marxist United Front

The way Marx kicked off the First International, in a masterful handling of an incredible multitude of international political factions can be seen in his Inaugural Address of a month later. Some would-be participants had to be convinced that this was not their organization and volunteered to leave. Furthermore the English non-electoral-political labor aristocrats had to be convinced that the refusal of foreign comrades to allow “scab” specialist workers to be exported to London (and the ability of these foreign comrades to enforce this prohibition) was worth their paying lip service to the “socialist idea” of what society should be about. – And, believe it or not, there were many even more vexing tactical problems. Marx had to resolve all of this and he did so in three points. You should take the time to read this nine page paper.

The Practical Problem of Anarchism

Once the International got sorted out in terms of member organizations and why they were accepted as members (or not in some cases) anarchism became a danger in Europe. Why? Because, unlike the earlier “utopian” anarchists of the French leader Proudhon, these modern Bakunin anarchists insisted on enrolling the agricultural masses into our (industrial) working class organization (The [1st] International of Workingmen).

Even if these illiterate, and thus ignorant, European farmers had not been under the influence of “organized anarchism” and it fallacious doctrines (e.g., their total misunderstanding of the role of the “state” in sociocultural evolution), recruiting them would have been tricky enough. This was true precisely and only, because of their low level of educational achievement, beginning with their almost 100% illiteracy.

These degraded European slave-serf farmers were our genetic equals but certainly not our cultural (in this case intellectual) equals. That was the nature of the servitude system in which they had been born and forced to live. Therefore, the revolution for this new world sociocultural evolutionary stage – we had and have to come to call Socialism - had begun this way it had. In fact it certainly would justify the coming existence of our Leninist party, and for that matter of ourselves! That was the problem. How to make these potentially capable potential workers be, jumped ahead several decades, so what they could be for themselves, and what they could contribute for our mutual benefit, in a very short period of time, could be made real!

As it was, our industrial workers stood to be overwhelmed by the masses of dehumanized continental farmer masses within our own organization. That could not be allowed to happen. We certainly did not need such non-proletarian masses demagogued into an anti-Marxist anarchist bloc in our organization. In the end, General Secretary Marx sent the First International Executive Committee to the USA, where all 19 sections of North American communists did as Marx bid and in 1876 dissolved it altogether, creating their own Workingmen’s Party.

Reign of Thieves

In power in Catalonia and Andalusia the Anarchist CNT began the wholesale introduction of its doctrine. Our Party leader in Spain Dolores Ibarruri (known in Spain as La Pasioneria for her passionate speeches in support of the Republic and against Fascism in the Republican Cortes [Parliament]) described the social order set up by the Anarchists in their part of Spain to be a “reign of thieves.” What did she mean?

Where the anarchist armed gangs could grab power they immediately redistributed all the wealth giving that taken from the rich to the poor.  But on day two they had no program. They abolished private property and abolished money (currency). Their military arrangements were just as primitive.

The problem they created was first in the alienation of everyone including workers and poor farmers who had a tiny bit of private property and wanted to hold onto it. The second was they eliminated money so how could exchange occur for any farmers small or large. The third was their idea of governing was a kind of rolling mass chaos.

We had a war to win and we needed to mobilize the entire progressive bourgeoisie behind a Marxist worker led movement. The anarchists with their silly radical programs were alienating large numbers of people the Republic needed on its side; without whom success in preserving democracy was seriously in doubt.

The Practical Problem of Revisionism

In 1888, a Second International was in the process of formation in Germany. Eventually it would become the biggest Party (German Social Democratic Party) of Marxists in Europe; which unfortunately went immediately off onto the wrong road. Ironically, this Party declared itself Marxist and, in fact, to be the model Marxist Workers Party for the rest of the advanced capitalist world. This had been on the table for a long time and the organizers had asked Karl Marx for his imprimatur (prior to his 1883 death.)

Marx however, had declined the offer to be official intellectual chief and denounced their program from the moment of its formation. Ironic, is it not, that the man they called the genius and scientific master, never considered any of the factions within German social democracy to be “his.” Let’s say it again: Marx never considered any of the German factions to be Marxists (although he maintained friendly relations with many German socialists as individuals). Marx said to his daughter and son-in-law, about the “revisionism” of the German social democrats, to paraphrase, “if what they are is Marxist then I am certainly no Marxist.”

Initially Marx lost out to these “revisionists” who managed to keep control of the political aspect of the labor movement, not only in Germany, but in most of Europe. Inevitably these revisionists entered into a de facto political alliance with European capitalists denouncing revolution and advocating evolutionary change toward socialism. In exchange they got seats in Parliament and a lot of cosmetic changes they wanted. What the capitalists got was a conforming labor movement at home and in support of its imperialist adventures abroad.

Marx was stunned by this development and had a great deal to say about revisionism in the movement claiming him as its ideological father (as in Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) where he formalizes his break with emerging German Social Democracy. But published only years later, after his 1883 death; that is, in his struggle to educate the German’s he preferred to give them time. Accordingly, Marxists did not publish this Gotha critique immediately and it would not see the light of day for sixteen years.

The Practical Problems of Orthodox Marxism

Other Marxists also did not buy the revisionist opportunist nonsense and kept on the right road. Most important among these was V. I. Lenin and his followers in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party which split between its own revisionists and the Leninists. The latter went on to create their own (Bolshevik) Party as we have seen. The point being when they (the revolutionaries; the Bolsheviks) had the opportunity they went altogether international again – for the Third time – and created the Third International (the Communist International or Comintern.)

The Russian empire included many nationalities and the Bolshevik Party naturally was led by men from a multiple group of nationalities other than Great Russian. So, the Russian Revolutions of 1905, February 1917 and most importantly October 1917 consisted of multiple national groups working together en masse and in their leadership. Furthermore as the counter-revolution launched the Civil War in the Russian Empire, troops were recruited by the Bolsheviks from a multitude of nationalities and sent to fight at fronts far from their homes.

Dzerzhinsky had the habit of sending Chekists originating from oppressed nationalities to areas in the Civil War where their enemies were also the immediate enemies of the Red Army – as in the Ukraine where Dzerzhinsky sent Jews to handle the reactionaries (largely pogromists of the Black Hundred anti-Semite variety) for the Cheka. Why? If it isn’t obvious, it was because Dzerzhinsky knew he didn’t have to tell these men and women of Jewish origin why these Black Hundreds and their allies had to be liquidated as a category, root and branch. He didn’t have to worry about them getting “soft” on these class enemies of Bolshevism.

As the post-Civil War years set in, the Bolsheviks continued to build massive international support in the form of the rapidly expanding Third International and especially its secret arm. Within the Comintern the Cheka played the most important (secret) role.

Capitalism evolved into its fascist phase in Europe and country after country fell to one fascist conspiracy or another (Hungary under Admiral Horthy, Italy under Mussolini, Portugal under Dr. Salazar, Germany under Hitler). The Bolshevik Government in Russia (now the Soviet Union) responded with all sorts of internationalist interventions – open and surreptitious as we have seen.

Back at the Spanish Hacienda

Spain presented the entire world however with a new specter. That of a bourgeoisie split in half and a working class split four ways. The fascist specter of Spain under Franco emerged by mid-1936 when the diminutive General from North Africa began his campaign to overthrow the liberal bourgeois government in Madrid. Around the world, not only in Spain, the cause of anti-fascism (which is to say of bourgeois parliamentary democracy) finally got its much needed second wind. This time ready to help were the workers no matter under what leadership – at least at first.

In Spain this resulted in a rickety alliance of liberal bourgeois and patriotic nationalist capitalist elements with Communists, “independent” Marxists, Anarchists and Trotskyists. Stalin’s decision to avoid the red-baiting traps his enemies among the capitalists and Trotskyists were setting – most dangerously would be sending the Red Army and Navy to defend the Spanish Republic – sent instead International Brigades. This was a continuation of the policy of international working class action where the battle of one group of workers was also the battle of all of the workers of the world.

The Canadians and the US Americans who went to Spain were quickly publicized and popularized by the capitalist press as well as the Daily Worker (New York and London both had CP’s with newspapers of that name) and indeed saved the Republic in the fascist first attempt to take Madrid in November of 1936 and thereafter stabilized all the Madrid fronts and it would not fall to Franco until after they were withdrawn October 30th, 1938. Among the North Americans was long time US Communist Steve Nelson who by most accounts became by far the best commander the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (XVth International Brigade) ever had.

Spain Reborn in Me

By the time I met Steve in 1963, the Civil War in Spain had been over for 24 years. In 1963 Steve Nelson was the Party boss for the Northwest districts in the USA (Washington and Idaho were one CPUSA district and Oregon another.) He was so quiet and behind the scenes that I did not realize for some months after joining the CPUSA in the Oregon district that our leaders Don Hammerquist and Susan Wheeler were actually under Steve’s authority. But the point is over the next year Steve Nelson taught me as much as any human being, after Carlos Prieto, about the ins and outs of clandestine operations in hostile territory (which is where the Party is either outlawed or operating under more-or-less de facto “illegal” conditions.)

I realized in the time I knew Steve on a daily basis (he was living in Coos Bay, Oregon in these years) how important Spain had been. Not only for him but for the Party as a whole as a training ground for true lifelong revolutionaries. It was here they were often “first blooded” in class war and where they learned the meaning of discipline and devotion to the cause. Method and technique is a subject for another book at another time.

Lessons for Today

For our purposes and with regard to the possibility of a North American battalion being formed once more for action in Latin America to help revolutionary forces and governments I mention it here. Organizing a bunch of kids to inject a Party line into the mass demonstrations on the streets of Los Angeles today is all well and good if that is all you can do. It would be far better training if those willing were injected into the cauldron of real class war which always exists in battlefields such as those currently raging in Peru and Colombia and this is something you revolutionary cadre should consider. Our Party is aware of such undertakings at the moment and wishes them well.

Reality Check: the Real World of 1939

The Eastern Front – 1939 Japan Attacks

Back at the Mongolian ranch, in the national capital “Red Flag” (Ulan Bator) the Party bosses were worried. The spring had begun, and the Japanese continued their military testing of Mongolian frontiers with China, in one armed provocation after another.

The local Party leader was a personal friend of Comrade Stalin and he and the rest of the Mongolian Communist Party’s Politburo had cabled Stalin asking for specific military commitments along the Khalkin-GolRiver frontier with China. You may recall, by this time the Japanese capitalists had occupied large sections of China, including all of Manchuria, large sections of which bordered on the People’s Republic of Mongolia.  

Then, only one month after Franco declared victory in April 1939 the Japanese capitalists had attacked Stalin’s eastern frontier at a village along the Mongolian river Khalkin-gol that formed the Chinese-Mongolian border. The fighter planes perfected in the air war over Spain were in factory mass production and backed-up by still more planes being further perfected according to the doctrine of Deep Battle itself perfected in actual war time experience in Spain. The same was true for the armor corps which had been by far the best in Spain and was being further perfected back home in the Soviet Union when the Japs attacked.

The point is the affair in Spain was directly connected to the opening shots of the Second World War which happened to be fired in the East not the West and where it was Japan attacking first, not the long awaited English-French-German-Italian attack which had most worried Stalin. Stalin knew he had to avoid at all costs a two front war, which he well knew was the end-game strategy for the Western capitalists.

During the spring of that fateful year, 1939, while the attention of the West was riveted on Hitler and his next move, the Japanese capitalists prepared a massive attack on the Soviet Union and Mongolia. They began May 11th, initiating incursions into Soviet territory at the Chinese-Mongolian Khalkin-gol River border, launching its main phase July 3rd.

The Mongolian bosses were more worried perhaps than they should have been. The Boss had the situation well in hand.

Stalin’s chief spy in Japan, Richard Sorge (embedded as an SS officer in the Nazi embassy in Tokyo), told him, via his secret radio system, that the Japanese were playing out a scenario at the highest level. One group of Japanese imperialists wanted to attack north and secure Siberia from Lake Baikal east, for Japan – the other Nipponese imperialist leaders wanted to attack south, gaining more of China, as well as Indochina, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. The attack on Mongolia was the test that would determine which faction won out.

Stalin Pounds Japan’s Invasion Force to Dust

Stalin believed, based on Sorge’s intelligence, the Japanese did not have modern equipment and they relied upon suicidal troops to accomplish their missions. Accordingly he directed his hand-picked general George Zhukov to prepare a counter-offensive of a special type. Stalin gave Zhukov the most advanced tanks and ground attack fighter-bomber warplanes the USSR had – including those straight out of “prototype” design phase – shipped straight from their design institutes and manufacturing plants to the desert war zone. Zhukov was confident that this modern armament combined with infantry superiority would give Bolshevism victory.

In August, General Zhukov was ready. While building up for the counter-attack the Red Army had successfully kept the Japanese busy with a stall- And-retreat strategy. Now the time had come to kick some ass!

On the 20th of August, 1939, Zhukov delivered a smashing rebuff to the Japanese invaders at the Khalkhin-gol River, using advanced Soviet deep operations tactics (squares of tanks moving against the Japanese flanks and rear; supported by ground attack fighter-bombers) along with a massive infantry frontal attack (two to one, 60,000 to 30,000 men in the Soviet and Japanese Main Forces, went head to head).

The Japanese had no advanced warplanes of Soviet caliber, nor any advanced heavy tanks and worst of all no adequate anti-tank weaponry of any kind. In so doing Zhukov liquidated Japans entire main force including those who failed to surrender between the 27th and 31st, sending what was left of their total 80,000 man expeditionary force reeling back into Manchuria minus their armor, artillery and remnant air force.

Japan’s million man reserve, waiting to move into Siberia, witnessed deep battle first hand while waiting in Manchuria, and they sat dumb. They were not nearly as well equipped as their expeditionary spearhead that had just suffered Japan’s first smashing defeat of World War II (although the Soviets would not be in the war with Japan until August, 1945.)

Pearl Harbor Now Inevitable

According to Sorge, the Japanese High Command was stunned by the Soviet counter-attack, concluding the readiness of the Red Army was of a far higher quality than they had imagined. The Japanese gave up once and for all on the northern strategy and decided to strike south against the USA, UK, France and the Dutch, in pursuit of all of their colonies and the rest of China.

Herein lay the inevitability of Pearl Harbor.

If Hitler had been paying attention he would have seen what was waiting for him in the Soviet West. But, he wasn’t. So, while Stalin’s ploy did not stop the Nazi assault (but along with their upcoming difficulties in their Balkan campaign, the Red Army’s shockingly effective assault on Japan’s best forces came as an upset to Hitler’s generals) it would help to delay it until the summer solstice of 1941. – And, the Japanese were so badly mauled the Jap General Staff would never again consider getting into that conflict, even when the Germans appeared to be heading to victory.

Lenin’s Far East Policy Succeeds

In the meantime, in China, Mao Zedong’s hand-picked Communist Party General Lin Biao launched the 100 Regiments, Party-Army attack, that dealt death and destruction on the left flank of the Japanese army garrisoned in Manchuria as well as north-central China, the Chinese heartland. The Jap response was to launch the 3 All’s campaign which massacred 22 million Chinese between 1941 and 1943. A holocaust nearly four times greater than what the Germans did to the Jews.

However, the expanded war in north China between the communists and the Japanese Army had the effect of securing Stalin’s Siberian frontier, by tying down all of Japanese imperialism’s armed forces. (China thereby fulfilling Lenin’s hope for an eastern frontier “nation” allied with the Soviet Union against imperialism.) Also, the Japanese genocide against China fed huge numbers of volunteers into what was to become the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

Meanwhile the fascist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek continued its refusal to fight Japan. The Communists continuing as the only indigenous Chinese force fighting Japan’s invasion.

The Western Front Revisited

German Attack on USSR Forestalled

The German capitalists, unified under the Nazi’s, struck out at Britain and France, September 1, 1939, using the Polish war as the excuse. Even after Poland went under, and Britain and France were technically at war with Germany, they didn’t do much of anything. Their “phony war” was in reality the last phase of their wishful thinking about Hitler. Still hoping not to provoke the Fuhrer; hoping that he would keep going to the East! But, in the Far East the Japanese capitalists sued for peace on September 16th.

Stalin made every possible effort to forge an alliance with Britain and France to contain Hitler but every effort was rebuffed. Including the one at the last minute (July and August of 1939) when Stalin made tremendous overtures to both the French and British regimes for a collective security agreement against Nazi Germany. Disappointingly, that initiative resulted in the London government sending a low ranking delegation by slow boat to Murmansk. - And, from France no response at all.

Stalin then directed Molotov to seek a non-aggression treaty with Germany. It succeeded and the USSR avoided war.

The greed and fanaticism of the British and French ruling classes had blinded them to the possibility - nay, certainty - that Hitler would strike against them first; finish the unfinished business of the First World War, simultaneously bringing both France and England into the Nazi orbit. Hitler almost succeeded.

Inside Snapshot

1939 - Tying Loose Ends before it gets cold - Katyn

Stalin turned the tables on the British and French capitalists with the Soviet-German Non-aggression Treaty. In September, 1939, Red Army forces moved into Poland and Eastern Europe and Soviet attack units moved closer to the new Soviet-German frontier.

Along the way there were other fascists to be dealt with. Some of the worst were in Poland, in the officer class of the feudal army. This class of parasitical blood suckers had reduced Polish workers to virtual slaves and committed every imaginable crime against the working people of Poland. Most importantly, they were our most lethal enemies in that part of the world and, we would have to fight them sooner or later. As it happened they fortuitously ended up in our hands and that was the end of them. It happened this way.

The Boss was meeting with Cheka chief Lavrenti Beria.

“Lavrenti. Our troops have occupied the agreed upon territory along the old Curzon line as you know. What you may only be learning about is the arrival of many thousands of fascist Polish officers on our territory… running from the Krauts. These are our most deadly enemies in Poland and I want them dealt with as we did with similar elements in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and most recently in Finland.”

“Deportation?”

“No. That’s what I mean. Similar elements. Fascist infectious parasites. Deportation and the chance to start over the right way is fine for the normal bourgeois elements, especially the recalcitrant petty bourgeois farmers. But these fascist Polish army officers are deadly infectious germs. They are sworn to our destruction. There is no rehabilitation possible here. They are the leftovers of our defeat at Warsaw in 1920. We owe it to them. This is a special category of enemy equivalent to the Black Death. I have no intention of giving them any more of a break than they have given the millions of our fellow workers and farmers in Poland, who they have raised like farm animals except without as much kindness. Not to mention the fact that these are the ones who killed my wife.

“Besides as soon as the war with Germany starts they will be back on the side of reaction helping the Nazi’s if we leave them alive now. We will just have to kill them later if we don’t do it now, and they will take a lot of our men with them since they will have guns and be part of the fascist assault. Anyway, on the main point, revenge is often a dish best served cold. You know what to do.”

“Yes. I have already sent four divisions of NKVD troops to Katyn to take the situation in hand. These divisions are made up of hard core communists mostly of Jewish extraction. There are some 20,000 of those fascist mother fucking Poles there so far Koba.”

“Good thinking. Felix used to do the same thing in the Ukraine. We won’t have to worry about those men and women getting soft on these Black Hundred type of scum. Just be sure their poor kids are sent directly to our orphanages – if they aren’t orphans yet they will be in a few days. Anyway, can you handle it?”

“Yes. It will take a couple of days.”

“Well get to it and step it up. My weather forecasters tell me permafrost is at most 48 hours away at Katyn. This should be completely over before the ground freezes. I have meetings until midnight. Then join us in the Kremlin if you like. I’ve got a new Chaplain movie.”

“Thank you Koba. I’ll see you then.”

1940

Then, in 1940, in a lighting strike, Hitler moved against Scandinavia, Benelux and into France. Using the plans provided to him by England’s one-time King, the Duke of Windsor (a long time Nazi - See End Note 35 "the Nazi Duke" in my book THE BUCCANEER, 2003, Jason W. Smith, Writers Press, Boise 330pp), the Nazi spearhead circumvented the Maginot line; then found French commanders helpfully withdrawing - inviting the Nazi’s to take their country. It was the typical (Fifth Column) betrayal the world had gotten used to seeing - by the big Capitalists and their bourgeois allies against their respective nations, hoping that the fascists would be good enough to liquidate their organized labor movement when they took over. Which of course they did.

British troops could have been rolled-up by the Nazi’s while they lay trapped in France at Dunkirk, but Hitler was absolutely certain that this last of the “parliamentary” regimes of Capitalist Europe would see reason and surrender to his forces. He stopped.

Then he got the big surprise. Britain’s new PM Winston Churchill, with his perfect command of European history, and his worldliness that came from having been all over Africa and Asia in his youth as part of one military campaign or another {and a brief stint as a prisoner of war in an Afrikaner Camp (from which he escaped!)} was not afraid of Labour so much as he was of Hitler. A good anti-communist himself, he saw the Soviet Union as far less of a threat to Great Britain than the Nazi’s. He had no intention of making a deal with the gutter snipe Hitler. {Churchill being the son of a Lord was quite class conscious and not at all likely to make a deal with a poor-White-trash nincompoop like Hitler to take over his realm. At the same time he was sufficiently worried about the communists to read the London Daily Worker every day.} Churchill rescued his Army in France and began a determined fight to save Britain and destroy Hitler.

- And, so there things stood.

Comeuppance

Trotsky in Mexico, August 14, 1940

“I have one more thing Koba.” Speaking was Lavrenti Beria.

“Go ahead.” Responded the Boss.

“Siqueros is going to be able to get to the Anti-Christ.”

“How is that?”

“Rivera’s home was a perfect sanctuary for him. It is well guarded because of Diego and because President Cardenas wants him secure. But the scumbag (Trotsky) has had a sexual affair with the wife (Frida Kahlo) of his host (Diego Rivera). Thus, Trotsky and Rivera have had a falling out, which is currently assumed to be political, except among those in the household, where as you know we have an agent waiting. President Cardenas is disgusted and will stand aside.”

“It is much better for a Mexican of the caliber of Siqueros to handle this if at all possible.” Commented the Boss.

“Of course. I hope Siqueros will, but you know what these guys are like… big mouths, short on thinking and planning.”

“Well, if necessary pull out Ramon. We have to tie off all the loose ends, before this war starts.”

“Yes, Koba, of course, I just wanted you to know that Trotsky moved to another home in the Coyoacan locality, much easier for us to attack, which we will be able to handle. Either with this fumble bum Siqueros or with our own agent. Anyway it’s just a matter of days or a few weeks now.”

“What are the chances of getting Ramon out alive?”

“Not good.”

“I hate to leave a great comrade like Ramon to that fate if there is any way to help him exit. No, I know you can’t. But you know what I mean.

“Keep me informed.”

“Of course. – And, if there is nothing else?”

“No Lavrenti. As usual you are doing a superb job. Felix would be proud of you. As  I am.”

“Thank you Koba. That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me.”

“One of my worst failings lies in my failing to acknowledge great contributions. If I haven’t said so before I apologize.

“Oh that’s not necessary Koba. I better go.”

What had just happened passed into history for Stalin was an afterthought of a long day at work. But, for Beria it was the beginning of a new day. Koba never complimented people like that unless he really meant it.

Trotsky Dies

Trotsky did not have long to live. First Siqueros tried to kill him with a squad of gunmen who poured hundreds of rounds into his bedroom window. Trotsky managed to escape by hiding under the bed. Consequently Beria pulled out his undercover agent Ramon Mercader who buried an ice pick in Trotsky’s head.

Stalin must have found it amusingly ironic that Mercader killed Trotsky on August 21, 1940, after a mountain climbing excursion, with an ice pick – after decades of snide abuse from Trotsky who never failed to describe him as a “mountain climber”, as if this athletic endeavor is all he was ever good for. Now Trotsky died by the hand of a mountain climber wielding an ice pick. I don’t know about Stalin but I would have found this cold revenge immensely satisfying. At any rate, the bullet holes and the blood on the floor from the ice pick attack have been preserved along with the home itself for those wishing to visit this Coyoacan (Mexico City suburb) home, now a museum.

In the aftermath the Trotskyists tried to make a big deal out of the assassination by trying to prove Stalin having given the order. Not that there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about who gave the order. But it was 1940; the imperialists were at war with each other in Europe. The Nazi’s were preparing to attack the Soviet Union and were being actively encouraged to do so by the rotten British and French ruling capitalist oligarchy. Trotsky passed into history without very many caring very much.

For his part Mercader did 20 years in a high security Mexican prison and was returned to a hero’s welcome in the USSR in 1960.

The Mexican Intelligentsia

I have often said that “I never met any real intellectuals until I went to Mexico in 1962.” I had certainly never met any in Idaho with the exception of Gideon Oppenheimer, Merle Wells and Frank Church. However, that may still be an exaggeration because I had met real intellectuals in London in 1961, but I was only there for one month (June – I left London the day before the baby was born that became Princess Diana years later – I have described that event under the subhead “Lady X” – the closest friend of Mother Spencer – in volume one of my autobiography The Buccaneer.)

So it was in Mexico City that I met intellectuals by the bushel, so to speak, via the good offices of the well-known Mexican playwright and communist Carlos Prieto. My experiences with these people changed my life because, for the first time, I realized I was not a part of a permanently inferior class (my intellectual predilection for Marxism) but part of the most advanced class of thinking people in the world. There had been no turning back for me anyway. I had chosen my side and nothing could dissuade me from my scientifically derived decision. But meeting hundreds of people who thought the same way I did, for the same reasons, was a wonderful change in the world as far as I was concerned.

Trotsky’s Last Love

I mention this here because a very fine example of this class (the Mexican intelligentsia) and the general milieu of those times are shown in the 2002 movie Frida, (about the wife of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, starring Salma Hayek, Alfred Molino, and Geoffrey Rush.) This is the first time, in the bourgeois movie industry; of which I am aware, where Frida’s sexual episode with Trotsky is explored, or at least exposed.

Left movie makers seem to have been allergic to describing Trotsky’s simple human failing in this regard – perhaps because these de facto Left Petty Bourgeois intellectuals found it natural to conclude it was this “piggish-ness” on Trotsky’s part which led directly to his death.

I think this is extremely ungenerous. After all, after what he had been through, Trotsky had to be in fragile shape and perhaps Ms. Kahlo really helped him. The fact that Trotsky’s wife was with him during this affair, in the same household, and we know he felt very bad about that, makes me think, even more so, that he was not emotionally stable by this time. I think history tells us why.

Stalin had left him alive but stripped of just about everything. His self-confidence and perhaps his manhood had to be in personal question and doubt. To me, Trotsky at this point in his life is a person to be pitied, not hated. Lenin, himself, after all had brought Trotsky on board initially. Lenin had had to see some good qualities in Trotsky. – And, in fact, Trotsky did perform many useful services up and until he lost out on the succession altogether.

Stalin, a man who never forgot a slight, a man who never failed to remember a hurt, a man who was exceptionally sensitive to what others might have risen above (e.g., snide class background comments), however saw him as the author of all “Trotskyite” conspiracies, real and imagined.  Trotsky had made himself into Stalin’s nemesis. Accordingly, Trotsky had to die.

At any rate, the movie is based on the book by Ms. Hayden Herrera.

– And, the point is somehow the producers got everything in the production values exactly right. I would highly recommend this movie to get an idea of the cultural setting of the Mexican intelligentsia, which was still virtually unchanged when I arrived in Mexico City at the beginning of September in 1962. I have described some of this in The Buccaneer – volume one of my autobiography “Idaho Smith’s” Search for the Foundation!

Who Will Attack First?

The imperialist war against the Soviet Union could not be delayed forever. One could jockey only so long until it would be a reality. - And, Stalin had been doing his best to gain strategic advantage on his western borders, moving Soviet attack forces closer and closer to those borders, and demanding and getting territorial concessions. Stalin was preparing the option of striking the Nazi’s first – but in the beginning of 1941 he needed to wait one more year, or perhaps eighteen months, for the newest version (Spanish Civil War derived) T-34 land tanks and the Sturmovic aerial tanks to be produced in sufficient numbers.

Scrambling for Position – Zhukov all over the western Frontier

Throughout 1940 Stalin jockeyed for the best position from which to launch a preventive war against Hitler rather than a defensive war. Consequently, his favorite General George Zhukov was sent to the western frontier to prepare the depth of armament of various types waiting for the jumping-off order. A most important source in English about this preparation is the book The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. All the data to support the historical interpretation in the appropriate chapters of this book (13 through 16) is provided by Suvorov. Suvorov is a pathological anti-Stalinist who missed the boat in his intellectual life by getting aboard the anti-Stalin Khrushchev ship blaming Stalin for the conspiracy to attack the capitalist west rather than the other way around.  If one set Suvorov on his head he would have it right.

The fascist regimes on Soviet borders, for example, Bulgaria, to provide access to its rivers and Romania was required to surrender certain adjacent territories to the Soviet Union. Other defensive steps had been taken against Nazi supported fascist Finland, while the reactionary regimes in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia were eliminated when Soviet troops occupied them. Germany continued to be tied up in combat in Greece and now Yugoslavia.

In December, 1940, over the Holiday season, Stalin brought 250 odd generals and admirals to Moscow for a top secret meeting on preparation for a Preventive strike against Germany. The deployments prior to June 22, 1941, were part and parcel of this offensive strike strategy. The unfortunate part was that these left huge sections of the Red Army susceptible to encirclement as they crowded the western frontier of the USSR should Germany strike first. Which, of course, they did.

May 1, 1941

Stalin Orders “Spoiling Attack”

“Vlad since we don’t know what the Nazi’s may be planning on our frontiers, and there is way too much movement too close to our western border, this possibility of launching a major Yugoslav offensive is of critical importance. Tell Tito to attack them now.”

Joseph Stalin’s old friend Joseph Broz Tito came to the Boss’s rescue in the spring of 1941 by launching a deadly counteroffensive against Nazi troops in Serbia and other parts of Yugoslavia. This delayed the German assault on the Soviet Union for five critical weeks.

You will recall Tito was last seen in this book in Paris where he guided the inflow of fighter volunteers (the Internationals) to the Republican camp at Albacete, Spain. In the interim Stalin had sent him home to Yugoslavia, to begin preparations for the liberation of that sorry country, still suffering under the jackboot of its own ruling class. Therefore, he was in place to organize and lead the attack on occupying Nazi troops in the spring of 1941 that delayed Hitler’s assault on the USSR for these critical five weeks. (Before Tito’s war against the Nazi’s concluded in 1944, 1.4 million Yugoslavs, 10% of the Yugoslav population, would be murdered by the Master Race.)

Nazi Attack Finally Gets Underway

June 22, 1941

Then the Nazi’s attacked the Soviet Union on the 22nd day of June, 1941. Hitler had been almost as good as his word. He just waited until he thought he had secured his western frontier before turning against the Bolsheviks, on his eastern one.

Along the way, Hitler took his European allies with him in this desperate adventure. The people of these countries would rue the day they allowed that decision and among their soldiers no more than a handful would return home alive. For example, Spanish fascist troops, victorious in Spain, would be liquidated in totality in Russia. Why? Because, Franco had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact and sent several divisions of Spanish troops against the USSR in Hitler’s surprise attack. All of whom would die and never see home again.      

Contrary to imperialist propaganda, Stalin entered the war with the advantage. He had only to fight the great capitalist powers one Front at a time and in the meantime had neutralized the others. This was the final triumphant advantage as the decades long program of unified capitalist attack against the Soviet Union had been definitively destroyed by the equally decades long Leninist foreign policy of Rapalloism (keeping the cap countries divided).

The Soviet “Neo-Napoleonic” Battle Plan

June 22, 1941 to December 5, 1941

Since 1917 the Soviet Union had been preparing for this capitalist assault against the homeland of the world socialist stage. As we have seen the Soviet policy had begun and continued for nineteen years (1922 -1941) around the Rapallo principle of keeping the imperialist (remember imperialist, in Marxist terminology, means the highest phase of the capitalist stage) countries divided, as far as a joint attack against the USSR was concerned. But it was inevitable that capitalism would attack eventually – thus, the capitalist attack had to be made particulate.

That is to say, given our technological limitations, we wanted to fight the global capitalist stage one part at a time.  One part of the world capitalist stage at a time, meant one capitalist country or bloc of countries at a time.

Stalin, for twenty years, had done everything humanly possible to prepare for the inevitable World War (II). Now it had come and the USSR had a war plan.

(1) That plan began with the strategic overview of being able to assume the eastern front against Japan and the USA would be neutralized.

(2) Then the USSR would have Option A to attack the Western alliance (meaning attack the Nazi’s first), or, now that the war had begun with the German’s making the first move, the Soviet Union had Option B, which was to absorb the Western attack. (Which meant, now in practice, to absorb the German attack with military and civilian resistance, slowing down the aggressor, while the Soviet High Command detailed the defense tactics and prepared the counter strike.)

This second option (B) then put forward the responding Soviet Battle Plan under the title: the “Neo-Napoleonic Battle Plan.” This plan was known only to the higher echelons of the Party, the STAVKA (military high command) and the Cheka.

Option B: the Neo-Napoleonic Battle Plan

(3) In the event, the USSR would have to absorb the incoming 3.5 million Nazi and satellite troops while preparing a counterstrike at Moscow. Along the way it would have to fortify both the northern and southern elements of the Battle line which would extend from Leningrad (St. Petersburg; Petrograd) to the Caucuses (Batum and Baku).

(3) Every element of civil society as well as the military fronts would have to be involved. This meant the citizens of the great Soviet cities in the West would have to fight one way or another right alongside the Red Army. This was a modernized anti-Napoleon strategy, in that it would feature scorched earth from the Western frontier to the stabilized front running from Leningrad to Moscow and south to Baku and Batum.

(4) The German’s were getting weaker by the day as they expanded into the Soviet Union. At least one million of the 3.5 million soldiers they sent against Socialism would die in the six months from June 22 to December 5th. Their machinery was destroyed, worn out, and ultimately frozen.

(5) Meanwhile the Soviets moved a great deal of the western industrial plant behind the Urals where it was literally inserted into the top secret military-industrial complex. All of this was done according to the neo-Napoleonic Battle Plan, Stalin and his generals had drawn up over the previous several years. Inherent to this plan was a modern “people’s war”, in that the civilian population would not be evacuated. Instead the Party would have to see to it that the civilians fought too, whatever that meant – even if it meant just being in place and having to be taken prisoner or killed.

(6) The Strategic Battle Plan was to be concluded by the movement of available Red Army elite units into position behind Moscow, in order to launch a counterstrike at the moment the Aryan’s became most vulnerable. However, now in practice, Stalin had only about 30 of these elite divisions (some 300,000 men) available for the counterstrike which was not enough. To do the job and reverse the Nazi assault he needed to move another 40 elite divisions into position (some 400,000 men) from the anti-Japanese Mongolian front and put them together with the 30 elite divisions already near Moscow.

(7) In the end this Battle Plan worked perfectly, exactly as intended, and just as planned. But, the cost was indeed quite high for us as well as for the incoming scum.

This is how it happened.

Inside Snapshot

Stalin with Zhukov: July 25, 1941

Pacing in his Kremlin office, Marshall (Five Star US General rank - ed) and now Supreme Commander of all Soviet Military Forces, Joseph Stalin walked to the door, being opened by Poksrebyshev, extending his good right hand to grasp that of One Star General George Zhukov commander of the Far East Red Army District. The two men walked directly to the war map on the wall of the Stavka’s Supreme Commander (Red Army High Command’s Supreme Commander – i.e., Joseph Stalin) and gradually made their way to the couch at the side of the room the Boss rarely used. Only with his closest friends or most important conversationalists of the moment.

“George, I made the decision to move our attack vanguard forces to the frontier in the West in order to try and impress Hitler with the impossibility of launching a successful attack. Unfortunately it didn’t work. If anything it made Hitler think, correctly, if he was to have any chance at all, he had to attack us this year, and do so in such a way as to knock us out of the war by the onset of the Holiday Season this year. We lost 1800 aircraft on the ground on the first day George and it gets worse with each passing day after that. Fortunately, these attack vanguard forces we lost were the oldest and least important aircraft. So, we will recover.

“Although, it will take a year to get our aircraft and tank factories producing to maximum capability behind the Urals. The only good part of this is that the Nazi’s made their main attack against our least important aircraft. The truth is our best new Spanish experience designed air attack force is already being developed and will be available next year. Between now and then, unless I can come up with military assistance from the United States, it will continue to be a massive GNP struggle to get re-equipped while the Red Army fights a defensive war of attrition and maneuver.

“What it comes down to is we can hold a line, here follow me, from Leningrad to Moscow and south to Batum. That is for this year, and probably next year, although the Germans are going to have to go for the oil sooner or later; at the moment that is not their primary target. For whatever reason they are coming straight for us here in Moscow. A half million of them at least I figure are left in Army Group Center.

“We could turn this against them if you were to be able to move your entire main force from Siberia to Moscow in time to do another Khalgin-Gol envelopment. But, I can‘t move you unless I know the Japs aren’t coming for us.

“When will you know?”

“Probably tonight.”

“Do you mind me asking Koba, how do you know?”

“I have a spy on the Japanese General Staff. They are meeting right now on this question.”

“Jesus Christ! I mean whatever it should be these days. I had no idea. No wonder you had the Order of Battle for Khalgin-gol! Well, what do you think they will decide - to go for it or back off?”

“I think they will back off, but the pressure from Berlin is powerful. We are countering it as best we can but I am afraid we may lose our best agent if he keeps up what he is doing. I have asked him to risk it all in trying to convince the Japs not to go for German overtures to enter the war. His masters in Berlin SS could easily discover he is doing what he is doing and that will be the end of our asset there. At any rate, if we can move your forces how long will it take to get ready for an encirclement of the German Army Group Center?”

“I can be in place in twelve weeks. Meaning, specifically, 40 well trained fresh divisions (10,000 men per division – ed.) at full TO&E including all of our aircraft. - And, Koba the troops are all pumped up. They just gave a humiliating whipping to the Japs, and they are very well provisioned and eager to get at this disgusting fascist enemy hand-to-hand. They know they can be the saviors of the country and I have never seen morale so high. Even back in the Civil War Koba.

“At any rate, in twelve weeks, we will have these forty divisions within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of Moscow in front of the Urals, where hopefully the Nazi forward air recon will not be able to reach. So it will be winter, or nearly so, when we launch the counterattack and we will be better prepared for that than they will be. Furthermore, our Army Group will be moving forward to combat, directly in front of Moscow, without further preparation. Going off the march, in winter mind you will be part of the direct attack in the offensive, in other words, and this will be an additional 400,000 troops on our side the Krauts don’t know about and will not be expecting. They will be forced onto a defensive posture immediately and you know we won’t let them dig in.”

“I don’t expect to win the war here George but I need to know if we can hold Moscow. I want you to always tell me the truth on this one point. I know the call may change from day to day. I want you to tell me about such changes in your view day to day. Do you understand?”

“Yes Comrade Stalin I understand. You can count on one thing.”

“- And that would be?”

“If you bring my Army Group to Moscow we will stop these cabbage-eating cocksuckers cold! – And give them an ass whipping that will make what we did to the Japs look like a Sunday School picnic!”

Orlov and FDR = Harry Hopkins to Moscow

Meanwhile, Stalin’s long planned need for Orlov to enter the picture in a decisive event changing way, succeeded. Orlov used his existing route to FDR to assure the US President the Soviet Union under its chief Comrade Marshall Stalin would never agree to anything other than total destruction of Hitler and his entire Nazi gang no matter what the cost or consequences! FDR then decided to send his most trusted representative to Moscow – Harry Hopkins – to see what the situation really was, and what if anything FDR could do to help. (See the movie World War II, When Lions Roared. John Lithgow, Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins as Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.)

Inside Snapshot

Stalin November 7, 1941 at Red Square and in the Moscow Subway

As Nazi spearheads approached Moscow Stalin evacuated the government behind the Urals. He stayed in Moscow to oversee its defense. Stalin also insisted that the annual Revolution Day (November 7 new style) parade through Red Square continue as planned. Tanks, artillery, airplanes and soldiers paraded through Red Square and then went straight to the front now only a few miles from Moscow. Stalin spoke to them:

“Brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, citizens and comrades, I speak to you today as we prepare to meet the fascist menace now so near to our dear working class revolutionary capital. I want to assure you that the mighty Red Army is fully deployed to deal with the threat. Furthermore, I want you to realize when this battle is concluded the Nazi spearhead against our country and our just cause will have been liquidated.

“Despite the propaganda of the Nazi world-wide capitalist press conspiracy against us the fact is the Germans have suffered grievous losses. We know they have suffered over one million dead soldiers since their June invasion. Their military machine is grinding to a halt thanks to the heroic resistance of our Great Red Army and the sudden appearance of our best ally, Old Man Winter. Hitler must have been rather ill educated to have forgotten what happened to Napoleon in the winter.

“We have a new and powerful ally in the form of the United States of America and I have already agreed with its President to conduct a common war against Hitlerism and the Mussolini gang.

“Now let each and every one of us march from here to the front. Again as at Kronstadt! Let it be so again. Everything for the Front!”

Smashing the Nazi’s: The Battle of Moscow

The Japanese capitalists resisted the strong pressure from Berlin to enter the war, and even though they had just discovered Beria’s spy Richard Sorge, operating from inside the Nazi Embassy in Tokyo, in the fall of 1941, it was too late to undo the work he had done for the Soviets. The Japanese had been burned so badly at Khalkin-gol two years earlier (thanks to Sorge’s intelligence and Stalin’s sending of Zhukov’s super-force to Mongolia) that they opted not to get involved. Stalin, his confidence in Sorge reinforced (after Sorge had correctly predicted the Nazi attack down to the day,) transferred crack Red Army divisions from the eastern frontier where they had been confronting Jap forces in Manchuria, to his western one – specifically, right in front of Moscow.

On the 5th of December, 1941, two days before the USA came into the War, because of the 7 December attack on Pearl Harbor; Stalin launched the counterattack that almost ended the war in Europe. That Japanese attack on the USA could just as easily have been a Japanese attack against the USSR and would have been, had Stalin not launched the totally successful counter-attack against the Japs along the Khalkin-golRiver in Mongolia two and a half years earlier.

Now, Stalin, knowing the Japanese were not going to enter the war on Germany’s behalf, was able to send a seemingly limitless number of fresh Siberian troops from the east, and they hit the Nazi’s like a tornado in a cornfield, dealing them death and destruction in front of Moscow. Stalin had placed his Siberian Warrior Chieftain General Zhukov in charge of the Red counterattack at Moscow; he did on a much larger scale to the Germans what he had done to the Japanese a little over two years earlier. At battles end the Red Army had smashed the German Army GroupCenter and thrown them back one hundred miles!

Immediately thereafter Zhukov left for Leningrad where he and the new Party Boss for Leningrad Zhdanov restored order and established a permanent defense for Leningrad against Army Group North. After six months of war 1.5 million German and satellite soldiers lay dead. With a little more expertise and experience in dealing with such large military forces, the Red Army would have been in Berlin in May of 1942, instead of May, 1945.

January 1, 1942

Inside Snapshot: STAVKA Hq Moscow

“I’m sorry Comrade Stalin, they ran beyond our reach and we won’t be able to complete the envelopment.”

“You have done magnificently George. You and the entire STAVKA. The Moscow Front is nearly two hundred kilometers further west, and the capital is permanently secure. You see our intelligence system is working as well if not better than ever. Half of these cocksuckers that came at us are dead. You killed at least 350,000 of them! They don’t have the strength in men to come at us again on this Army Group Center front. – And, most of their materiel is useless, because of lack of maintenance and weathering and wear and tear. They will not be able to move against us here and now I want you to go to Leningrad and take charge of the defense there. Zhdanov is the new Party Boss for Leningrad and he has the civil situation in hand but he needs you to build a permanent military bulwark against Army Group North. So, their only remaining offensive possibility is with their Army Group South.

“So, while you are stabilizing our Leningrad front, in the meantime, we will see how Hitler will move in the spring. Our foreign intelligence networks indicate he is raising half a million more men, some fifty divisions, from satellite countries to fill out the losses in Army Group South. I presume they will head for the oil at Baku and Batum. Which is not good for us.

“We won’t be able to get a situation like Moscow again unless he turns his spearhead against some city to the east of the current front in the South. For us, the spring and summer campaigns will have to be ones of stall and retreat, attrition and behind-the-lines sabotage.

“However, I want you to know and whomever you need to tell at STAVKA that by October 1 this year (1942) we will be back to pre-war production rates in all key military industries from coal to steel and machine tools for heavy industry and the heavy industrial and tank and aviation factories behind the Urals. We may have to burn the oilfields at Baku and Batum but we have plenty of oil in storage in Siberia and as much more as we need by train from Vladivostok thanks to our American friends. Our weapons stockpiles are being rebuilt as we speak and we will have ten thousand T-34 tanks by November and five thousand Sturmovics (ground attack aircraft called air tanks and tank busters). So, we have to wait anyway while you stabilize the northern front.

“Perhaps we can launch some spoiling offensives soon. But only those strong enough to indicate that these are the best we can do. But get Leningrad secure first and then we will see what we can see.”

What are you planning?

“You don’t think they would be dumb enough to walk into it again do you?” Zhukov asked the Boss.

“George, I didn’t think Hitler would be stupid enough to attack us to begin with. So, I don’t want to make a decision based on what the intelligent thing to do would be. Logic says go for the oil and he has little choice. Their industrial machine has only weeks to go before it grinds to a halt for lack of oil.

“Yet, they don’t need two million men to go for rural Caucuses. I think Hitler wants a major world-wide known “communist” city. What better city than the one named after me, which is after all one of our “show” cities?

“George, I have instructed both the Cheka and G2 to keep the idea of an easy success at Stalingrad, and what a great victory for Nazism it would be, in front of Hitler and his General Staff and especially in the fanatical elements of the Nazi Party. George if you can come up with some ways to indicate to the German code breakers that (1) we have no strategic reserves left, and (2) we have no tactical strength in the south to defend the Volga at all, (3) what an easy and highly valuable target and acquisition Stalingrad would be, and (4) everything else our agents are doing, then George, perhaps we can entice the Little Corporal one more time.”

“I’ll get right on it. I know we can plant all of that shit through our combat intelligence feed to Wermacht wireless spies now that we have the enigma thanks to Philby. That’s a stroke of genius Koba. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”

“So, I will talk to you on the telephone as soon as you get to Leningrad. I need to know today what the situation looks like.”

August 1942 - January 1943

Wiping Out One Quarter of the Nazi Army: The Battle of Stalingrad

It was left to be played out once again, six months later, in the winter of 1942-1943, at Stalingrad. The battle actually began six months later, in August, 1942. And concluded with our total victory in January, 1943. While 20,000 US Marines were being dropped (and left stranded) at Guadalcanal, in that late summer month (August 1942), the Nazi reinforced 6th Army (Army Group South (b) with about 300,000 Germans and about 500,000 satellite troops) reached the outskirts of Stalin’s city. {What had been Tsaritsyn before the Bolshevik Revolution.}Defending was only General Chuikov with 20,000 men!

However, at the last minute, another division (13th Red Army elite Guards) arrived in September, when the Kraut 6th Army was losing 20,000 soldiers per week at Stalingrad. The majority of their mercenary allies from Spain, Italy, Hungary and Romania not to mention the White Russian traitor forces, had run to the sidelines, nominally holding the north and south extremes of the Volga front. Now the Red Army had only to grind down Krauts.

Then, after the Nazi’s, and their European allies, had pushed well into the city, and three months of house to house, cellar to cellar, hand-to-hand combat, (See the movie Enemy at the Gates) the Red Army launched a massive counter attack (on November 19, 1942) and 1.2 million fresh communist troops drove pincers behind the German forces to surround and trap 300,000 of them in that great city along with 200,000 puppet troops (Spanish, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian). Very few Kraut invaders survived. (Perhaps one hundred lived to return to Germany! None of the others were heard of again.)

- And, Hitler lost 25% or more of Germany’s total Army TO&E (i.e., one quarter of the Germany Army’s entire equipment inventory) Stalingrad was the end of Germany. Only 18 months after the Nazi’s had rolled the dice risking it all in their 3.5 million man surprise attack against us June 1941, their total strength had been reduced by 50% and their Kraut Sixth Army and its foreign allies totally liquidated!

Humiliating End of Hitler’s Forces Underway

The Battle of the Kursk Salient kicks off July 5, 1943

After the destruction of the German forces in Stalingrad, which was completed in January of 1943, it was all over for Hitler except the fighting. All over for the Germans except the dying. – And, the dying they now had to accept.

Especially at Kursk in mid-summer 1943, when the remaining Nazi cream was ground into hamburger and their tanks into junk. The Krauts never stopped running until they were dead or encircled in Berlin, and all of Eastern Europe was liberated along the way.

1943: Espionage is Critical at Kursk

Stalingrad had broken the back of the Kraut military machine and the battle at Kursk in July 1943, had destroyed the better part of Hitler’s European armor force as Panzers and the most modern Tiger tanks, and a multitude of armored attack vehicles, got chewed up by the thousands. (Tigers were German 88 artillery pieces armored and motorized – but they did not have slanted protective armor, which made them susceptible to attack by Soviet T-34’s which were much faster and armed with heavier cannon.)

One reason the Soviet strategy worked so well at Kursk is because the British had broken the German military cipher using their machine code-named “enigma” and the project resulting code-named Ultra. (You will recall from Chapter thirteen an Enigma-Ultra machine had been captured by the Poles from the Germans and the British got one from them) which by the time of World War II provided a clear insight into German wireless communications.

No, the British did not give the German Order of Battle at Kursk to the Russians. Stalin got it from Kim Philby who was on the “double cross” XX (20) Committee that handled ultra (enigma) source intelligence. This I note here because the British should have told Stalin everything they knew about the Nazi Order of Battle and they did not. Without Philby’s input the outcome at Kursk might not have been as wonderful as it was.

Furthermore, although it would not be known to our imperialist allies (the US and UK) until forty years later, Philby had given every detail he could get about how the enigma decoder worked directly to Stalin as soon as he found out about them. These details he picked up quickly as the newest MI6 member of the XX committee and forwarded them all to the Boss, so at Kursk the Soviet military intelligence command was directly breaking German military communications on the spot because they now knew the enigma machine and the allies ‘Ultra’ secret.

Then just before the battle, against one million fascist troops (70 heavily reinforced Kraut and satellite divisions), the Red Orchestra came through with the detailed jumping off and daily order of battle for these troops, as planned by the Nazi high command.

Penetrating the Manhattan Project

The Atom Bomb – February 1943

“So Lavrenti, how hard is this new Uranium weapons program going to be to duplicate?” Asked the Boss of his intelligence chief, Comrade Beria.

“The Americans are just getting started, so whatever we do now should be two pronged in my view. I have spoken personally with all our knowledgeable scientists. I have had to go back to school myself – literally – under their direction I signed up for the appropriate physics courses at MoscowUniversity. – And, they will be the best tutors I could have. This is essential because you and I have to know the details of how this weaponry is developed and is to perform and for that one of us at least has to become expert in atomic physics.

“Anyway, what it comes down to is we have to duplicate the initial experiments done in Berlin, and now in Chicago, to split the atom. With the data thus recovered the Anglo-American think-tank will be able to calculate how much explosive potential can be generated from a Uranium bomb. How they are to acquire sufficient Uranium of the right kind and then ignite it are problems they have not yet addressed.

“What we know now is that the American atomic scientists have told President Roosevelt there are five ways to get the necessary fissionable Uranium in theory. They don’t really have any idea which will work, if any. He has told them to proceed with all five varieties of producing the right kind of Uranium and these projects are in five different States! But the brains of the operation and apparently the central most important atomic weapons base is in the US State of New Mexico. We have complete penetration on the chief of this project; a gentleman named Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer via a parallel* (type) espionage operation being run by Comrade Steve Nelson in the San Francisco Bay Area. So, at the moment we think New Mexico is the main place to control from an intelligence perspective.

*****

*In “parallel” espionage operations a network is run alongside the target persons. This is a network of experienced, or most importantly, fanatically loyal Party cadre, who happen to be “friends” of “friends” of the targets. So our agent would never interview J. Robert Openheimer but would daily debrief his “friends”, “friends.” Jane Edgar Hoover never figured out this simple standard operating procedure of intelligence agencies around the world, historically, and thus her anti-espionage anti-red searches did little or no good. The FBI was doing backgrounds on persons not in any way associated with the Soviet espionage program. End of Story. After that it was just standard tradecraft.

*****

“The point is, Koba, if we launch a program against this industrial project along the same lines as we did for years, nearly two decades, against the industrial potential of Germany and Italy for example, then we could supplement our own research with the results of theirs. In this way overcome the handicap of our already overtaxed industrial base.

“In short, what I think is we need Lev (Orlov) to do for us in North America what he did for us in Europe. Fortunately he is in place. The problem is he is there for his special mission. But, Koba, getting him involved in this would certainly compromise his original mission if Roosevelt were to learn of this new activity of his, somewhere down the road.”

“That’s a risk I am willing to take now. After Stalingrad, we can win this war without any foreign assistance if need be. Should we pull Lev back first or send someone to him.”

“I take it you are prepared to allow me to proceed with an industrial espionage program against this Uranium Bomb? It is undoubtedly going to be the most expensive we have ever mounted.”

“Yes.”

“Koba, I have examined the travel situation and we could send him and bring him back via Alaska. Take a train to and from Vladivostok and then fly to and from the Americans who could assist in bringing him from Alaska to regular transportation. Without knowing why, of course. But, it’s a long trip and I don’t advise it. Lev is not as young as he was twenty years ago in the civil war. I think we should send our best agent to him. Lev can guide him and be training his replacement at the same time. I am sure he would prefer that.

“Did you ask him?”

“Yes.”

‘That’s fine with me if that’s the way you comrades want to handle it. Frankly, I like your idea of Lev developing this program. He has done it several times before and against much more competent counter-espionage programs than anything the clowns in the FBI could put up against him. Where will he be stationed now and how about the little girl?”

“He says Roosevelt has lived up to his word and he is not being followed at all. He believes only Harry Hopkins is aware of his presence and his role. However, that may be, he wants to go to the state of New Mexico in order to be able to run operations at close hand personally. He says his daughter’s rheumatic fever aftermath has not been what they had hoped and some doctor thinks they should move to the southwest US for this reason.”

“I’m sorry to hear she is not much better hopefully no worse. You know she got that while her parents were fighting those Muslim crackpots in the Caucuses for us. Anyway, New Mexico is one of those Border States is it not?

“Yes Koba.”

“Well, if memory serves me, didn’t we start Borodin somewhere in Mexico out there in 1918?”

“Nothing wrong with your memory Koba. I had forgotten about that until recently when I had to go through our North American file in complete detail. Yes Borodin worked in and out of Mexico through El Paso which is in Texas but at the Texas-New Mexico state border.

“Christ Lav we have run more shit in and out of the US since then, through that door, than Simon has Kopecks.”

“Yes. I think this thing is going to go very smoothly. - And, I have several candidates to work directly under Lev, for you to review, but this one (handing him the file) is the only trained nuclear scientist and NKVD school graduate we have. Comrade Alexander Feklasov. He could enter under normal diplomatic cover.”

Beria handed the Top Secret file to Stalin as if to conclude what he had had to say.

“Proceed. Keep me informed, of course.”

“Of course, Koba. - And, if there is nothing else, I have an appointment with the American Steve Nelson now. He will provide the on-the-ground troops to enable this expanded project I am now calling ‘Operation Orlov and Son’s’ program. In English, that will be OOS in code which will confuse the shit out of them. If they ever run across it they are thinking OSS.”

“Yes, I see what you mean OSS and OOS sound suspiciously alike in code breaking. Anyway. Yes, I know Steve. One of our best in Spain as I recall. If he has time bring him in to say hello.”

“Consider it done Koba.”

With his nearly trademark concluding comment the secret police boss was out the door, thinking Nelson would be happy knowing the Boss asked to see him again personally if he has the time. His boss was smiling too; Stalin thinking to himself that “Felix (Dzerzhinsky) would be proud. Beria may have personal problems but he is the best cop I’ve had since you left us so early, and without permission…” The Boss returned to his desk and buried himself in a mound of War Five Year Plan stats he had to review.

Stalin Rescues His Allies: Battle of the Bulge

Stavka Hq Moscow

Christmas 1944

“Well, George, What can we do to help?”

“Fucking Pathetic. They waited four years to start their second front, and until we had won the war for them, and then they fucked it up completely. How is this possible? Any fucking Moron would have spotted that Kraut concentration long before it got underway. What the fuck are they doing out there?”

“I think they are settling in for Christmas and New Year’s vacations. A lot of their troops are on holiday in Paris and the Riviera. George they don’t have the slightest fucking idea what war is all about and this is what happens. Anyway, I can’t ignore Roosevelt and Eisenhower. FDR was speaking directly through Harriman to me, and while he is just another imperialist, he is like Jesus Christ compared to Churchill and Hitler. If we don’t save them now, they would remember later, and this could then be the first shot in the next war Churchill is trying to rope the Americans into as we speak.”

“Philby again?”

“Of course. Churchill can’t have a bowel movement without Philby calling it in. Right Vlad?”

“Unfortunately yes, Koba.”

“But George the truth is we have more spies in London than a dog has fleas. There are so many we have to keep the Army G2 and the Cheka from following each other around Westminster. We get the same message across the board.

“Anyway, I want to tell Roosevelt that despite the horrible weather and everything else we will attack several weeks earlier than planned and attack the Nazi’s with roughly 120 armored and mechanized divisions (~1.2 million men, 24,500 tanks, 25,000 artillery pieces and 11,736 sturmovik tank buster warplanes) within 24 hours, along a 900 mile front from the Baltic to the Balkans. That should do the job.”

“Oh yeah, that will do the job. If they still are willing to fight some Germans. We can’t do everything for them.”

“You have no objections George?”

“No. What choice do we have but to save these incompetent boobs from themselves?”

The End in Europe 1944-1945

Stalin’s Operation Bagration which expelled the Germans from Soviet territory and liberated east and east central Europe is sometimes considered by military experts to be the greatest successful military endeavor in history! It climaxed with the May 1, 1945, encirclement and storming of Berlin and the Fuhrer’s Bunker and the Reichstag taken and immortalized in film.

Inside Snapshot Stavka HQ Moscow

April 16, 1945

“George I’m concerned that Churchill may prevail and order Eisenhower to the western frontier of Berlin in order to try and squeeze in on the victory. You know what that weasel Churchill is like. He would treat that as a recon-in-force, looking for a way to sneak their way into a cheap alleyway to Hitler’s bunker, after it costs us a quarter of a million dead and who knows how much of our resources.”

“I’m worried too, Koba. We could easily stop them but that might kick off the next anti-imperialist war before we are ready.”

“Exactly. - And, that is what Churchill is really trying to do. So we will double our effort. You asked me for command of the Battle of Berlin and I owe it to you George. You can have it. You will use Chuikov of course to lead the actual assault and entry to the Reichstag. That will put the Red Flag over Fascism by May 1st. But, do you agree we should give Ivan (Koniev) responsibility for the defense of the Western entry and also simultaneously send him against Berlin?

“Absolutely. Of course, for a capitalist general it might be personally and career-wise more satisfying to have sole command, but you know Koba I am a communist first and before all else. You’re right. This is the safe thing to do for communism and we can’t take any chances on those shit-eating Limeys getting in on this – or the Yanks for that matter.

“Besides the troops will like it. It will be a contest, and my troops, and Ivan’s, will be enthusiastic about which Army can kill the most Nazi’s and get to that piece-of-shit before the other. It worked for us at Khalgin-gol, Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and countless times in Bagration. It will work here.”

“Now, George I know you want to go, and I want you to go and take charge personally of the end of that piece-of-shit.”

“Yes sir. I’m on my way.”

Stalin and Zhukov prevailed as usual and the Red Army did plant the Red Flag on the Reichstag by May 1 (1945) seizing Hitler’s bunker, where the Kraut leader had already pulled his own plug. Almost four years exactly since the long awaited fascist assault against Socialism had begun; it now ended dismally for the capitalists and triumphantly for us! It remained to mop up the Japs and that would take the Red Army only a matter of days.

The Eastern Front Revisited

1945 The End for Japan

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the Soviet Red Army invaded Manchuria in August 1945, as per prior agreement (at the Tehran and later Yalta Conferences, Roosevelt asked Stalin to provide this essential help to the US - Stalin had agreed) and forced the immediate surrender of the Japanese multi-million man occupation force there. (Where the Japanese learned what Deep Battle was all about, as the Germans had learned confronting Operation Bagration in Europe.)

With the captured weapons of the Japanese, the Chinese Reds would be able to finish off the corrupt fascist regime of Chiang Kai-shek in 1945-49. (Plus all the US weaponry sold to the communists by Chiang or captured by them.)

Despite the atomic bombing of Japan the Nipponese imperialist General Staff planned on continuing the fight. But with Red Army troops invading Japan’s northernmost islands and half way through the KoreanPeninsula the Emperor decided in favor of surrendering to the Americans. He knew what would happen to him and his class if the Stalinist forces arrived in Tokyo! The outcome: One Front - the USSR vs. USA Globally.