The documentation from the current archives of the Russian Federation, previously integrated into the former USSR, was guarded with absolute jealousy until the end of the Cold War. However, since they came to light in 1991, they have played a very important role in reconstructing in a much more reliable and accurate way the involvement that the Soviets had in the Civil War, a direct military intervention that Stalin decided, between mid-August and late September 1936, while enjoying a break in the Black Sea spa town of Sochi.
Regarding the communist dictator’s justifications for carrying it out, the idea weighed that, if Spain ended up in the hands of Franco, it would represent a danger to France, the country that constituted the first link in the chain that had to be blocked and stopped. Hitler’s expansionist desires. And, if that one fell, it would be a danger to the Soviet Union. They had no doubt that Nazi Germany would end up developing a more aggressive policy in Europe, as happened shortly after the Second World War began with the invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece. and France, without forgetting the frustrated attempt to conquer Great Britain.
Stalin had no doubts about how Spain’s problem should be solved as quickly and efficiently as possible: assassinate Franco. In his book ‘The Orlov Case’, former Russian secret service agent Boris Volodarsky claims that the USSR sent up to three expeditions with the aim of carrying out the assassination while implementing a much more complicated plan in case the first one failed: Operation X, where “X” meant Spain. This consisted of supporting the Republican army by sending all types of weapons and men.
The latter was officially decided at the meeting of the Politburo – the highest body of power in the Soviet Union – held on September 29, 1936. However, the actions had already been undertaken days before in secret, so approval was a mere procedure. On September 14, for example, in another meeting in the Kremlin chaired by Vyacheslav Molotov as president of the Council of People’s Commissars, approval was given for the purchase of weapons for Spain in the markets of France, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia. And on the 26th Stalin telephoned Marshal Kliment Voroshilov from Sochi to order him to also send some one hundred tanks and sixty bombers, with their corresponding drivers and pilots, in addition to a new shipment of weapons.
The final help
The final volume of Soviet aid throughout the Civil War was 648 aircraft, 347 tanks, 60 armored vehicles, 1,186 artillery pieces, 340 mortars, 20,486 machine guns, 497,813 rifles, 3.5 million projectiles, 862 million cartridges, 110,000 aviation bombs and four torpedo boats, according to figures provided by Ricardo Miralles, professor of Contemporary History at the University of the Basque Country. And to this we must add another 66 igreks, that is, transport ships that had to ford the siege imposed by Franco’s navy in the Mediterranean and enter Spain through the Atlantic coast of France to transport the aforementioned weapons.
The volume was very large, but that of Germany and Italy was greater, since both powers sent fifteen hundred aircraft that participated, among others, in the bombings of Guernica and the Alicante market. The difference was that the Russians’ weapons did not arrive alone. They did it together with a good number of military advisors, technicians, weapons specialists, instructors, aeronautical engineers, mechanics, radio operators and, finally, translators, who were very important for communication between the Russians and the Spanish to be reliable. To all of these were added approximately another 2,200 men and women assigned to the most diverse support tasks.
If we break down the number of military advisors that the USSR sent to Spain – over six hundred – we observe that one hundred served in 1936, one hundred and fifty in 1937, two hundred and fifty in 1938 and, since the beginning of 1939, when Franco’s victory seemed matter of time, eighty-four. That is to say, they were there until the end because, in reality, the Soviets always wanted to prolong the Spanish conflict and buy time until the Second World War broke out. For coordination tasks, a command structure was created, headed by a chief military advisor (GVS, for its acronym in Russian), who had his own General Staff and more specific advisors in each area, from the navy to the communications, including aviation and infantry, among others.
Kim Philby
The complex operation of transportation, training and combat by land, sea and air did not prevent Stalin from secretly continuing his plan to assassinate Franco; a coup d’état that, he thought, would be much more effective than any battle on the front. That is why he organized up to three expeditions. The first is better known because it has been told many times in newspapers and turned into fiction by filmmakers and writers such as John Le Carré, who was inspired by it to create the central character of ‘The Mole’, his most famous novel. It was carried out by Kim Philby, a British war correspondent who had been recruited by the Soviets when he was twenty-two years old.
The least known chapter of Philby’s career is this first spy mission in the Civil War, under the cover that he was covering the conflict as a special envoy for ‘The Times’. On that initial trip he had stayed in our country for three months. Upon returning, he managed to get the prestigious British newspaper to publish a report titled “In Franco’s Spain”, which opened the doors for his permanent correspondent on the Franco side, facing the public, and his work as a spy, incognito.
During his coverage, Philby was awarded the Red Cross for Military Merit by Franco himself, who believed him to be a sympathizer of his cause. He took quite a few risks to maintain his cover, as he was almost killed during the Battle of Teruel, when, while they were eating chocolates and drinking brandy on New Year’s Eve 1937, a Republican projectile killed three correspondents who were nearby. side. When the Russian secret services sent him there they already knew that his will and courage were not strong enough to kill the future Caudillo, so he did not even try despite finding himself, on more than one occasion, close to the objective. For years it has been doubted that he was the one chosen by Stalin. In fact, conclusive proof of this has never been found. According to the declassified files of the British Security Service, MI5, a Russian general who defected to Great Britain in 1940 revealed the existence of said mission and assured that it had been entrusted to a “young Englishman” who was a journalist.
Franco’s assassination
On the other hand, in the personal file of Nikolai Yezhov, leader of the NKVD, the future KGB, there is a report with the confession of General Walter Krivitsky after fleeing to the United States in 1938. This, according to the transcription made by ‘The Guardian’ , said: «At the beginning of 1937, the OGPU (secret police) received orders from Stalin to prepare the assassination of Franco. Hardt, an officer who was later purged, was instructed by OGPU chief Yezhov to recruit an Englishman. He was contacted and sent to Spain. He was young, a journalist from a good family, idealistic and anti-Nazi fanatic. Before the plan matured, Hardt himself was recalled to Moscow and disappeared. The curious thing about this document, according to the English newspaper, is that in the margins it had written “prob Philby” (“probably Philby”).
Almost simultaneously with Philby’s possible election, in the spring of 1937 there was another expedition led by Soviet intelligence officer Grigory Mikhailovich Semionov and a third commissioned by Elli Bronina, the wife of a Soviet spy based in Shanghai. . But they all failed, because Stalin seemed to be more interested in eliminating the Trotskyist traitors who had been sent to Spain from the Soviet Union, all under the terrifying logic that, to eliminate any external enemy, you had to first eliminate the enemy. internal, as was the case with his famous purges.
While the selective assassinations were carried out and the assassination plans failed, the different chief advisors of the Soviet Union arrived in Spain. In 1936 and 1937, Yan Berzin; in 1937 and 1938, Grigori Stern, and between the end of 1938 and the beginning of 1939, Kuzma Kachanov, all of them with their corresponding delegates and the project of creating a new People’s Army. It cannot be ignored that his contribution was decisive in the defense of Madrid, an operation that was a success during the first months of the war, and that also worked in some of the later battles, such as those of Jarama, Teruel and Guadalajara, as well as the training of Spanish soldiers and the creation of the military schools of Barcelona, Madrid, Almansa, Murcia, Albacete or Archena.
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