Toilers to Masses

With quaking Spanish Communists last week able to see from the housetops of Madrid the approaching armies of the Whites (see above), Joseph Stalin had not yet done anything to aid the Communist cause in Spain. Direct Madrid-Moscow radio communication had just been opened and the Central Executive Committee of the Spanish Communist Party flashed urgent appeals to the Dictator. Stalin's whereabouts have been secret since he was reported to have left Moscow "on vacation" with his entourage in an armored train, reputedly to suppress insurgence in his native Georgia. Last week, wherever Stalin was, the Spanish Communists soon got a radio reply signed by Stalin as Secretary General of the Russian Communist Party telling them that "The toilers of the Soviet Union are only carrying out a duty in rendering all the assistance in their power to the revolutionary masses of Spain."

This message could hardly mean anything less than that Soviet bombers and troop ships were about to start for Spain. In alarm the Great Powers peppered their diplomats in Moscow with urgent queries. When correspondents galloped into the Soviet Foreign Office on the diplomats' heels they were received by an official who said that he personally wished with all his heart that Soviet bombers were roaring toward Madrid. "Unhappily it is not so," shrugged this Bolshevik spokesman, "the Soviet has given its word that it will not intervene in Spain and the Soviet has always lived up to its word."

Meanwhile in London, sputtering Soviet Counsellor Samuel Cahan and silk-hatted Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky were blustering at Lord Plymouth in the Foreign Office "demands": 1) that the International Committee on Non-intervention in Spain be again convened and 2) that Britain and France "blockade" Portugal to prevent that country--which does not recognize the Soviet Union--from transshipping arms to the Spanish Whites. The exceedingly blue-blooded and frosty Earl of Plymouth, an Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, placed the tips of his white fingers together and murmured absolute refusal.

Meanwhile at Odessa, several thousand of Stalin's most industriously toiling "Stakhanovite" workers (TIME, Dec. 16) were accorded the privilege of a holiday at the waterfront while the Soviet steamer Kuban was loaded with clothes and food for Spanish Reds. Several Soviet steamers are now plying back & forth with this exceedingly tame assistance to Spaniards engaged in a death struggle for Communism in their country. At Barcelona last week the Soviet steamer Zirayanin landed 3,000 tons of foodstuffs amid a local celebration by the city's dominant Anarchists, Communists and Syndicalists.

Owing to a misunderstanding, foreign correspondents in Barcelona spent some time at Communist and Syndicalist headquarters looking for dumpy, old-time U. S. Rabble-Rouser Emma Goldman who is now a British subject and who, as they should have known, was at Anarchist headquarters. "I have come to Spain as to my own," cried Anarchist Emma to 10,000 Barcelona Anarchists. "Your ideal has been my ideal for more than 45 years. You are giving a shining example to the workers of the rest of the world !"

In 1919 French Anarchist Emile Cottin improved an opportunity to shoot and wound Premier Georges ("Tiger") Clemenceau, who died in 1929 with one of the bullets still in his lung. Anarchist Cottin, who was reprieved from losing his head on the guillotine by Victim Clemenceau, was announced in Barcelona to have been killed fighting the Whites last week on the Aragon front.

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