MARLBORO MAN. PART I.

This entry opens a short sub-subsection within the Stalin subsection, centering on Winston Churchill (1874-1965). I have nicknamed him Marlboro Man, reflecting both on his Anglo-American heritage, and on his generally pro-American stance. The next two Churchillian entries have been posted already. They are Operation Unthinkable (February 26^th, 2013), and Secret History Of the Iron Curtain (March 1^st, 2011).

There is little need in recounting Churchill’s biography, except perhaps for this fairly unusual summary at the official sight of the Nobel Prize Committee (Nobelprize.org), posted on account of his recipience of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953:

The Right Honorable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and an American mother, was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. After a brief but eventful career in the army, he became a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1900. He held high posts in both Liberal and Conservative governments during the first three decades of the century. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, a post which he had earlier held from 1911 to 1915. In May 1940, he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, remaining in office till 1945. He took over the premiership again in the Conservative victory of 1951 resigning in 1955. However he remained a Member of Parliament until the general election of 1964, when he did not seek reelection. Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him the dignity of Knighthood, and invested him with the insignia of the Order of the Garter in 1953. Among other countless honors and decorations he received special mention should be made of the honorary citizenship of the United States, which President Kennedy conferred on him in 1963.

Churchill’s literary career began with campaign reports: The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899), an account of the campaign in the Sudan and of the Battle of Omdurman. In 1900 he published his only novel Savrola, and, six years later, his first major work, the biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. His other famous biography, the life of his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, was published in four volumes between 1933 and 1938. (…Randolph Churchill; Duke of Marlborough… I wonder why he was not too eager to pursue world history on his mother’s side?..) His history of the First World War appeared in four volumes under the title The World Crisis (1923-1929); and his memoirs of the Second World War ran to six volumes (1948-1953/54). After his retirement from office, Churchill wrote a History of the English-speaking Peoples (in 4 volumes, 1956-1958). His magnificent oratory survives in a dozen volumes of speeches, among them The Unrelenting Struggle (1942), The Dawn of Liberation (1945), and Victory (1946).

Churchill, a gifted amateur painter, wrote Painting as a Pastime (1948). An autobiographical account of his youth, My Early Life, appeared in 1930.

(This is the end of Part I. Part II, consisting of my own take on Churchill, will be posted tomorrow.)

FRANCO: THE MAN WHO CHEATED THE ODDS. PART II.

…Stalin had reliable information that Generalissimo Franco was on his way out. There were millions of progressive men and women in Spain, who were profoundly dissatisfied and offended by the regime of this Hitler’s stooge. One of these days, Herr Franco would be assassinated.

Yes, Franco was clever. In 1947, to appease America, he had introduced the so-called Law of Succession, which would “officially” restore monarchy in Spain on the day of his death. But as Comrade Stalin’s legal experts had assured him, it could well be argued that all Franco’s pronouncements should be declared null and void after the fall of his regime, just as the laws of Nazi Germany had been abrogated at the end of the Third Reich. No more kings in Spain, thank you.

As soon as Spain got rid of her fascist dictator, Dolores Ibarruri would be returning to Madrid. With Soviet help she had a great chance, in the subsequent “democratic” elections, to become President of Spain. Artem must realize that Ibarruri’s success was practically a foregone conclusion, because it was so categorically vital to the Soviet interests. Moscow had already spent millions of its Spanish dollars, and was prepared to spend many millions more, to ensure it.

When La Passionaria becomes Head of State in Spain, Artem by virtue of his marriage to Amaya should be superbly positioned to establish a powerful personal presence in Spain. It would be then his job to ensure a continued mutually-beneficial relationship between the two nations, and to thwart any attempts by Western agents to make Spain deviate from the course of unflinching friendship and cooperation with the USSR.

In other words, it would be insane to trust our Spanish Comrade Dolores in anything, but Stalin would rely on Artem to safeguard the Soviet interests in Spain and, having the vast resources of the Soviet superpower behind him, to take control in the country.

...My father complied. How could he ever say no to Comrade Stalin?

…But Franco did not comply.

The reason why Stalin’s grand strategy in Spain did not work was that Franco’s much-decorated persona had become one of the most prized possessions of the post-war Western civilization. His physical survival received a top priority among Western intelligence communities, particularly, with the recently established Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. All Stalin’s active and potential agents in a one hundred mile radius of the Caudillo had been efficiently liquidated, or replaced, along with Franco’s own loyal bodyguards, by specially-trained commandos in the US service. For this very reason one of Stalin’s most reliable assassins, the legendary Kim Philby, for instance, was never allowed to get close to the Spanish dictator after the war, despite his previously cultivated personal ties to Franco, a cause of great pain for Philby’s wounded pride.

…In other words, among the loud salvos of public brouhaha over Turkey, and Greece, where the Russians had absolutely no interest in, or the slightest control of, the local communist insurgency, the real Cold-War Battle of Europe, taking place in Spain, was quietly fought, and quietly won by the West.

FRANCO: THE MAN WHO CHEATED THE ODDS. PART I.

(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.)

LA PASSIONARIA OF THE SPANISH GOLD. PART II.

In October 1936, the loyalists were having an increasingly hard time defending their dwindling status quo against the relentless forces of General Franco. As the latter was about to lay siege to Madrid, the frazzled Republican government decided to move the Spanish capital from its current location in Central Spain, to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where prompt evacuation by ship would be possible and the danger of encirclement, unlike in Madrid, was practically nonexistent. First, they moved their government offices to Valencia, and later to Barcelona.

In the process of moving the capital, the Gold Reserve of Spain was supposed to be moving too, in bullion and coin worth well over three quarters of a billion US dollars in the currency of the 1930’s.

Concerning this gold, Dolores Ibarruri had a wonderful brainstorm, which would have made the following adventure an all-time classic, had it not been too hot for the printing presses. To make a long story short, amidst certain confusion and even panic in some Republican quarters, she used her authority as a Member of the Spanish Government, to commandeer the Gold shipment, then in the process of being evacuated, to the Spanish port city of Cartagena. There, it was loaded onto a ship, and taken across the Mediterranean, through the Straits, into the Black Sea, and into the Soviet port of Odessa.

To cut the long story short, Dolores delivered it all to Stalin, in exchange for his promise to assist her with every possible means available in becoming one day soon President of the new Spanish Republic. Finding it very much in concert with his own thinking, Stalin was quite happy to oblige.

The loss of the nation’s Gold Reserve became a shocking embarrassment for the Republican Government . The Socialist Prime Minister of Spain Francisco Largo Caballero suspected Stalin’s direct complicity in the theft, and would become so bitterly anti-Soviet, that he had to be replaced by the equally disgusted Finance Minister Juan Negrín, who was however somewhat better capable of concealing his feelings. Then, President Manuel Azaña y Díaz secretly appealed to Stalin, begging him to help to remedy the situation. The Republic was now practically penniless. But how could the miserable victim take the robber to court, when the robber was the only friend the victim had, while any judge or jury looking at the victim would have only murder in mind!

Stalin chose to be “generous,” and offered Sr. Azaña a nice way out. Of course, he was not going to return even one ounce of his loot to the legitimate owner. But he would happily consider all this Gold of Spain as payment-in-full for all Soviet expenses on weapons and troops made in the course of the war. You can see vintage Stalin in this vignette.

Their deal did not mean, however, that Stalin would expedite a single military shipment to the Republican Government. The historians of the Spanish Civil War have been puzzled by the pathetic ineffectiveness of Stalin’s help to his Socialist friends. My readers should be well equipped by now to solve this “mystery” for themselves.

As for Dolores Ibarruri, she returned to the war-ravaged Spain, to remain extremely active in the Civil War business. She had little to worry about, well-protected by a whole regiment of dedicated Communists, who now saw her safety as their best insurance for a safe retreat to Russia, after losing the war, as expected. Her Republican colleagues, whom she had so shockingly swindled, could not complain, because she was now under Stalin’s personal protection, and Stalin was still their only remaining hope to survive.

But no matter what, in 1939 Franco emerged victorious, Dolores found herself permanently settling down in Moscow as the Queen of all displaced foreigners… and World War Two had not even officially begun.

LA PASSIONARIA OF THE SPANISH GOLD. PART I.

…She has been called the most fascinating woman of the twentieth century, and also the most enigmatic. To me, she has also been my step-grandmother. Imposingly always dressed in black, she has been the origin of many famous dictums, among them: “¡No Pasaran!” and “Better to die standing than to live on your knees.”

She lived a long life, and these days, as I am unstoppably becoming an old man myself, she has been dead for many years already. Her name was Dolores Ibarruri.

One day not too soon I may sit down to write a personal story about her, but in this entry she is the central character of the less personal, but still little-known (yes!) historical episode called the Spanish Civil War…

Textbook history relates how the Socialists came to power in Spain in 1931, when the people voted monarchy out of existence. How the country’s diehard monarchists plotted to overthrow the Republic, in a series of initially unsuccessful attempts. How in 1936 the Rightist General Francisco Franco led a successful revolt against the Republican government, and in the ensuing war was supported by Hitler, Mussolini, and the Pope (Pius XI), while the Loyalist Republican forces were supported by Stalin and by the so-called International Brigades, organized by some liberally-minded Western romantics (Ernest Hemingway prominently among them as a war reporter on the Republican side), with considerable Soviet help.

But what textbook history failed to notice, however, was that, with friends like Comrade Stalin, the Spanish Republic had been doomed from the very start, enemies or no enemies. Just like Lenin before him, Stalin hated all socialists and independent communists much more than any of his capitalist adversaries. In so far as Spain was concerned, Stalin secretly rooted for Franco, while openly opposing him; and, while openly supporting the Republicans, secretly wished them all to drop dead. (Go figure that out!)

Thus, Stalin’s grand strategy in the Spanish Civil War was to bring the Left to ruin, to let the Ultra-Right win, and then to try to take control of the pendulum swinging back to the Left, with the help of the pro-Soviet Spanish clients.

Stalin was convinced that Franco would make a much easier mark to bring down than any of the Republican leaders. His logic was fine, considering Franco’s association with such unsavory characters as Der Führer and Il Duce. Had El Caudillo not managed to cleverly distance himself from the Axis Powers, by declaring Spain’s formal “neutrality” in World War Two, and had he not made himself indispensable to the free world by virtue of his anti-Soviet credentials, he would surely have had a great fall, just as Stalin had predicted.

In the meantime, Stalin did not have to look too far for “our man in Madrid.” She came to him. My future step-grandmother Dolores Ibarruri, indeed, made herself extremely useful to Stalin, displaying, along with her undisputed revolutionary pathos, an acute opportunistic brilliance.

She had become a romantic leader in Spain, in her own right. Always dressed in black, she appealed to the crowds with a self-reinforcing image. Her thinking in this matter of constancy in appearance was precisely like Hitler’s, who had several dozens of exactly the same clothes, with the intent of developing a lasting visual bond with the public.

Being a Communist member of the Republican Government, soon to become Vice President of the Cortés, La Passionaria, as she was called, enjoyed sufficient political clout to be able to pull off what was undoubtedly the most amazing heist of the twentieth century. I am referring now to the untold story of the Spanish Gold…

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)

THE STORY OF THE SOVIET ANTHEM

[For my reader’s information, the music and words of La Marseillaise, mentioned in this entry, were written by the Frenchman Claude Joseph Rouget de Lille in 1792. As for L’Internationale, its words were written in 1871 by the French socialist poet Eugène Pottier, at first, to the tune of La Marseillaise, but later (in 1888) provided with its original music by Pierre De Geyter. It is so ironic that although L’Internationale is one of the most famous songs ever written, very few people actually know the names of its authors.

…And one more thing. The current National Anthem of Russia happens to be a faithful reincarnation of the old Soviet Anthem, to the same music by Alexander Alexandrov and a slightly retouched set of lyrics by their original creator Sergei Mikhalkov.]

There are actually two curious stories here: one about the making of the Anthem itself, and the other about Voroshilov’s reminiscences around it.

It is a well-known fact that for the first quarter of a century of its existence, Soviet Russia/the USSR did not have an authentic national anthem. The first semi-official substitute for the Tsarist Anthem God Keep The Tsar, discarded after the abolition of the Russian Monarchy, was the Workers’ Marseillaise, with somewhat modified Russian words (as compared to the original French lyrics), but with its distinctive music intact. It was in use between 1917 (surprisingly adopted by the… Russian Provisional Government) and early 1918, but it was naturally a temporary thing. The colossal Russian admiration for the French Revolution notwithstanding, the song was not only a foreign invention, but was, besides, the national anthem of another (plus unfriendly) country. Tchaikovsky had used its music to symbolize Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. Thus, it was a controversial musical symbol of anti-Russian aggression, and for all these reasons it could not be sustained, except as a stirring revolutionary song.

In early 1918, yet another immensely popular French revolutionary song L’Internationale, composed in late nineteenth century, to become the international anthem of socialists, communists, anarchists, and other sorts of world revolutionists, was adopted by the Soviet government as Russia’s internationalist anthem, in lieu of a national anthem, to represent the “internationalist” character of the Bolshevik Revolution. The story of the Soviet Anthem goes faulty at this time, asserting that the decision to create a Soviet National Anthem would not be made until 1943, when in the midst of Russia’s Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany a national patriotic zeal was in particular demand.

But the truth of the matter is that the search for a Soviet National Anthem had started long before that, in the 1930’s, and a challenge of sorts was thrown to the Soviet composers to compete for the best proposal for it. Several proposals were indeed submitted (including one by Dmitri Shostakovich!). But it is also well known that by that time Stalin already had a favorite in the race, the composer Alexander Alexandrov, who was the organizer and artistic director-conductor, since 1928, of the exceptionally talented and magnificently spirited Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble, destined to become legendary. Alexandrov was also the composer of a number of excellent patriotic songs, having received the highest artistic title of The People’s Artist of the USSR in 1937. Therefore, Stalin had good grounds for being confident about Alexandrov’s eventual success in this endeavor.

The composer’s effort was crowned with the 1938 prototype Bolshevik Party Anthem, written together with the poet Vasili Ivanovich Lebedev-Kumach, often unfairly painted as a Communist hack, but objectively a solid, if straightforward and simple, writer of patriotic lyrics. Later on, in June 1941, it was again teamed up with Lebedev-Kumach, that Alexandrov would create the stirring masterpiece Holy War, which became the most celebrated song of the Great Patriotic War, sung by soldiers on their way to the front, bringing Russia to tears.

Stalin apparently loved the music of Alexandrov’s Bolshevik Party Anthem, and his 1943 decision to turn it into the National Soviet Anthem is evident from the fact that the latter’s words, written by Sergei Mikhalkov in a largely symbolic collaboration with the Armenian poet El Registan (Gabriel Arshaluisovich Arakelyan), were carefully fitted to Alexandrov’s 1938 musical gem, like an upgraded version of the Lebedev-Kumach lyrics… Such is the core story of the creation of the Soviet Anthem.

The next curious story, frequently and admiringly repeated by Voroshilov, sheds some light on the details of the first one, while bearing further testimony to Stalin seeing himself as Russia’s royalty. The event’s exact date is unclear here, but I would be more inclined to take it back to 1938, rather than to the later date of 1943.

…Marshal Voroshilov had not only been the commander of Stalin’s private army during the Civil War, and later Stalin’s War Minister. He also had a magnificent voice, at least in some credible opinions.

It was in this vocal capacity that Stalin summoned Voroshilov into his Kremlin office one day. At the same time, he invited the distinguished composer Alexander Alexandrov, who was of course both men’s favorite.

“We need a new national anthem,” said Stalin. “You write good music, Comrade Alexandrov. That’s why I have chosen you specifically to write it. And I want it to be just as good as the “God Keep the Tsar,” just as good, you understand?”

God Keep the Czar had been Russia’s old national anthem under the tsars. After the Bolshevik takeover, it was no longer in use, and the battle hymn of the Revolution L’Internationale was sung as its substitute. But now was the time for authenticity.

Stalin wanted to make sure that Alexandrov knew precisely what he meant by “just as good,” and he told the two men to start singing God Keep the Czar, in order to refresh their memory. Meanwhile, he himself sank into his big leather armchair and closed his eyes, as if taking a nap: his usual and well-known trick, when in fact he was closely watching his subjects.

The Marshal and the Composer, both dressed in full military uniform, standing at attention, began singing with strong, vibrant voices, and as they were singing that incredibly beautiful old Tsarist Anthem, tears of rapture were pouring down their cheeks. They were in Royal Presence, and felt exalted.

Stalin was sitting bemusedly for some time after they were finished. Then he looked at Alexandrov with a merry twinkle in his eye.

“Just as good!” he repeated, shaking his finger, and dismissed the composer.

HOLOCAUST AND THE SECOND FRONT

The focus of this entry is not on Stalin, but it is so organically linked to the previous entry by the subject of the USSR, the West, and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, that to place it anywhere else than right here would be unthinkable.

 “The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.” This sharp aphorism of Nietzsche’s offers the best explanation of what the Russians saw as the position of the West toward Hitler and Stalin, not only in the years and months immediately preceding World War Two, but also at the Teheran Big Three Conference, in 1943. Stalin saw this as the main reason why the Americans and the Brits were in no big hurry to open the Second Front. Let their two enemies, Russia and Germany, destroy each other!

Curiously, Stalin had a ready plan in place, developed as early as in 1941, to assassinate Hitler, as soon as the Allies would open the Second Front, provided this was done promptly enough. General Andrei Vlasov’s planted defection to the Germans in 1942 was actually, in part, designed to set the assassination in motion. (See the separate Vlasov entry Traitor-Hero, posted on my blog on March 17^th, 2011, for more.) But having realized that the Allies were not in a hurry to open the Second Front, Stalin wisely concluded that Hitler’s assassination in 1943 or later would be too dangerous for Russia, tempting the Allies to conclude a separate peace with post-Hitler Germany at Russia’s expense. The assassination plan was therefore abandoned, with tragic consequences for General Vlasov…

But that fateful American-British decision, not to open the Second Front in Europe early, had a remarkable historical consequence for many years to come, and perhaps for all time. This historical entry uncovers not so much the history of World War II, as the attitude to history, or rather, more specifically, to one of its most delicate pages, tying the worst excesses of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews to that deliberate procrastination on the part of Stalin’s rather questionable Allies.

In the opinion of most Russian Jews (whether they might be all anxious to share it with the Americans is an altogether different matter), and, even more importantly, of the Israeli Jews, be that the Holocaust survivors themselves, or the children of Holocaust survivors, such unconscionable procrastination had resulted in the war continuing for two years more than necessary, and so it made the Holocaust of six million Jews technically possible, thus putting an indirect, but harsh blame for the Holocaust on the United States and on the British, which in today’s terms amounts to putting the blame on America first and foremost. (Haven’t the Brits, they can ask dismissively, gotten their historical global comeuppance already, by losing their great British Empire, and becoming America’s poodles, so who cares about them anymore? But America, trying to sell herself to the Jews of the world as the staunchest friend of Israel, yet materially responsible for the Jewish Holocaust in World War Two, matters a lot in this respect… Never forget!)

There is thus a hidden, but very deep resentment for the United States in the hearts and minds of millions of Jews worldwide, and particularly, in Israel herself, whose status as the closest and dearest ally of the United States has been taken too much for granted by the “bipartisan” Washington, and probably by the American Jewish community at large, which is in itself exceedingly presumptuous and, even though emotionally understandable, still rationally flawed and politically inexcusable.