(The
story of how, after World War II, Generalissimo and Caudillo of Spain Francisco Franco
survived against the odds. This is my second and last Spanish entry in this
particular sequence, for the same reason as was stated in the note to the
previous entry.)
At the end of World War II,
an all-new conflict was shaping up between the two formerly allied sides, now divided
by the Iron Curtain. The crucial role of Spain in this new “cold war” conflict
has never been openly admitted, and its sweeping extent has never been made
public by either side. The Russians are never keen on revealing any secrets, as
a matter of principle. The West hardly felt proud of its support for the
double-dealing fascist thug Francisco Franco, even if for the greater cause of
protecting the war-weakened democracies of Free Europe from the “peril” of
Soviet totalitarianism.
Franco’s exceptional
political savvy had kept him out of the War Tribunals. Everybody knows, of
course, that his so-called wartime “neutrality” had been pretty heavily loaded
in Hitler’s favor, but, walking a very thin line, he had stopped short of becoming
a legally-defined “war criminal.”
This tiny legal loophole was surely enough for the United States and Great
Britain to allow Franco to remain in power in Spain after the war. Even France,
formerly staunchly anti-Franco, could not say “no,” when her senior Western
allies had firmly put their foot down.
Franco was as anti-Soviet
as they come: This was his best, and perhaps his only lifesaving qualification
that would allow him to live to a ripe old age, with all his titles and bonuses
intact, and to die a death of natural causes. Stalin definitely underestimated
the extent and intensity of the Western support for that “little Spanish bug,”
whom he had confidently intended to squash with his left pinkie. (Unlike my
unabashedly chauvinistic step-grandmother Dolores Ibarruri, Stalin did not care
about Franco’s Jewishness, but the fact that La Passionaria did, did not
make her necessarily anti-Semitic, as she did not like the Russians either…)
Yet, in 1949, Stalin was
still extremely confident that, paraphrasing Mayakovski, Franco was eating his
last pineapple dessert, before his brains would be splashed all over the
shiny parquet of his Madrid palace, and La Passionaria entered the city gate on
a white horse. For this reason, he invited my father to his Kuntsevo (“Nearby”) abode, to have a private talk.
He reassured my father
that he himself was constantly forced to do things which he would never have
done for his own private interest. However, as a statesman, charged with the
advancement of the public good, he had a different set of moral imperatives.
Stalin said that he
appreciated the fact that Artem had a family. Artem’s wife Nina was a good
person, she and her son, Artem’s son, would be well taken care of. Artem need
not worry about it. However, the Soviet national interest demanded that Artem
and Nina’s marriage now be dissolved, so that Artem would be able to perform a
new major function of vital importance to the country, by marrying a certain
Amaya Ibarruri-Ruiz.
For my reader’s
information, Dolores Ibarruri, and her slightly demented husband Julian Ruiz,
were both living in Moscow, although separated. They had given birth to several
children, but only two of them had survived beyond infancy. Ruben, the son, had
been killed in action at Stalingrad during the war, and now Amaya, the
daughter, remained their only living offspring. By marrying Amaya, Artem was
becoming the principal male member of the Dolores Ibarruri family. Here’s why
this was so vitally important:
The international
situation had become very tense, with the creation of NATO. As Stalin and Artem
were talking, Russia was on the verge of becoming an atomic superpower, having
successfully tested her first atomic bomb. The strategic military balance had
been restored in the world, but the superpower struggle of Russia and America
was just about beginning, and so, the role of Spain in determining the future
of Europe was now becoming pivotal…
(This is the end of Part
I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)
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