The Last Stalinist: The Life of Santiago Carrillo. Paul Preston

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СКАЧАТЬ left by the Director General of Security, Manuel Muñoz, before leaving Madrid for Valencia.77 The Norwegian Consul, the German Felix Schlayer, claimed that the preparation of the necessary document was the price paid by Muñoz to Communist militiamen who were preventing him joining the rest of the government in Valencia.78 Evacuation orders were not the equivalent of specific instructions for murder – as was shown by the safe arrival of some evacuated prisoners at their destinations. Whoever signed the orders, in the midst of administrative collapse and widespread popular panic, the evacuation of 8,000 prisoners seemed impossible. Nevertheless, Carrillo’s Public Order Council would undertake the task.79

      Among those pushing for the evacuation of the prisoners were the senior Republican military authorities in the capital, General Miaja and his chief of staff, Vicente Rojo, the senior Russians present in Madrid and the Communist hierarchy. Given the crucial military assistance being provided by the Soviet personnel, and their own experience of the siege of St Petersburg in the Russian Civil War, it was natural that their advice should be sought. The most senior of the Soviet military personnel were Generals Ian Antonovich Berzin, the overall head of the Soviet military mission, and Vladimir Gorev. Berzin, along with Soviet diplomats, had gone to Valencia with the government, while Gorev, officially the military attaché but actually Madrid station chief of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU), remained. Gorev would thus play a crucial role, alongside Rojo, in the defence of Madrid. Also involved were Mikhail Koltsov, the Pravda correspondent, perhaps the most powerful Russian journalist of the day, and Lev Lazarevich Nikolsky, the acting NKVD station chief in Madrid who went by the name Aleksandr Orlov. In fact, according to the principal expert on Soviet security services in Spain, Orlov was away from Madrid from 13 October to 10 November in Cartagena.80 However, his subordinate, Josif Grigulevich, was his liaison with Carrillo. They became active collaborators and friends. Grigulevich would certainly have transmitted to Carrillo the Russian view that the captive military officers who had refused to fight for the Republic should simply be liquidated.

      Other influential figures in the defence of Madrid were the senior Comintern personnel, Codovila and the Italian Vittorio Vidali. Known by his pseudonym of ‘Carlos Contreras’, Vidali had been instrumental in the founding of the Fifth Regiment, from which the Republic’s Popular Army evolved. He was the Fifth Regiment’s political commissar, and his conviction that rebel supporters within Madrid should be eliminated was reflected in his vehement articles and speeches. Conscious that the prisoners were already boasting that they would soon join their rebel comrades, Gorev and other Soviet advisers, including Vidali, insisted that it would be suicidal not to evacuate them. As the rebel siege tightened, Vicente Rojo and Miaja fully concurred.81

      Miaja soon established a close relationship with Carrillo’s deputy, José Cazorla, one of the key players in the organization of the fate of the prisoners.82 Taciturn and efficient, Cazorla believed that rebel supporters had to be eliminated. To carry out this task, as will be seen, he frequently relied on the advice of Russian security personnel. As concerned as Miaja about the prisoners was the forty-two-year-old Vicente Rojo, recently promoted lieutenant colonel. Rojo believed that the fifth column was made up of spies, saboteurs and agitators and feared that they could play a decisive role in the fate of the capital. Accordingly, he wrote, the military authorities had to take the decision to eliminate it.83

      The public order set-up of the Junta de Defensa under the command of Santiago Carrillo answered to Pedro Checa and Antonio Mije, and it is clear that they were in constant touch with the Russians. In the Ministry of War, there were meetings between Mije, Gorev and Rojo. Pedro Checa also had a key meeting at PCE headquarters with Gorev’s messenger Mikhail Koltsov.84 This was almost certainly the same encounter described in Koltsov’s diary as being between Checa and ‘Miguel Martínez’. In Koltsov’s version, ‘Miguel Martínez’ urged Checa to proceed with the evacuation of the prisoners. Koltsov/Martínez pointed out that it was not necessary to evacuate all of the 8,000 but that it was crucial to select the most dangerous elements and send them to the rearguard in small groups. Accepting this argument, Checa despatched three men to ‘two big prisons’, which almost certainly meant San Antón and the Cárcel Modelo – from which prisoners were indeed taken away on the morning of 7 November.85 The removal of prisoners was known as a saca. Clearly, three men alone could not organize a large-scale saca, which required written authorizations, means of transport, escorts and other facilities.

      Accordingly, Koltsov’s account seems to confirm Carrillo’s statement that the Consejería de Orden Público had begun to function late on the night of 6 November or in the early hours of 7 November and started the process of evacuation of prisoners. This required committed personnel, and Carrillo, Cazorla and Serrano Poncela turned to ‘Carlos Contreras’ (Vittorio Vidali). Although in Spain as an emissary of the Comintern, Vidali was also an agent of the NKVD. Both Vidali and Josif Grigulevich, who was briefly his assistant at the Fifth Regiment, belonged to the NKVD Administration for Special Tasks (assassination, terror, sabotage and abductions) commanded by Yakov Isaakovich Serebryansky. Grigulevich was a twenty-three-year-old Lithuanian who spoke fluent Spanish as a result of having lived in Argentina.86

      Enrique Castro Delgado, the Communist commander of the Fifth Regiment, described how, on the night of 6 November, he and Vidali/Contreras gave orders to the head of a special unit: ‘The massacre starts. No quarter to be given. Mola’s fifth column must be destroyed before it begins to move.’87 The clear implications of the encounter between Contreras/Vidali and Castro Delgado are that elements of both the Fifth Regiment and the NKVD were involved in what happened to the prisoners in November. There were many JSU members in the Fifth Regiment. In a revealing interview in 1986, two years before his death, Grigulevich stated that, in Madrid, he had worked under the orders of Santiago Carrillo, heading a special squad (brigada especial) of Socialist militants in the Dirección General de Seguridad dedicated to ‘dirty’ operations. The squad was formed by Grigulevich from what he called ‘trusted elements’ recruited from members of the JSU who had been part of the unit responsible for the security of the Soviet Embassy in Madrid.88

      Grigulevich’s assertion is sustained by the record in the Francoist archive, the Causa General, of the post-war interrogations of JSU members of what came to be three brigadas especiales. Grigulevich had arrived in Spain in late September and worked for Contreras for some weeks before beginning to collaborate with Carrillo in late October or early November. Carrillo, Cazorla and the unit’s members knew Grigulevich as ‘José Escoy’, although he was known to others as ‘José Ocampo’.89 The documents in the Causa General are further corroborated by a report, written in the autumn of 1937, by the Republican police that referred to the frequent visits made to Carrillo’s office by Russian technicians specializing in security and counter-espionage matters. The report stated that these technicians had offered their ‘enthusiastic collaboration to the highest authority in public order in Madrid’, which would seem at first sight to have been a reference to Carrillo although it might have referred to Miaja since he was the authority under whom Carrillo worked. If the latter, it would mean that Carrillo’s activities were covered by Miaja’s approval, as he was quick to emphasize shortly after the publication of The Spanish Holocaust. Of course, his collaboration with the Russians would have happened anyway given the Soviet links with the Communist Party. The report went on to state that Carrillo had directed these technicians to ‘the chief and the officers of the brigada especial’.90 This was confirmed by Grigulevich, who later described СКАЧАТЬ