Who Killed Andreu Nin?

...Also implicated are two of Carrillo's wartime aides, Fernando Claudin (another journalist) and Segundo Serrano Poncela Koltsov was, of course, killed by Stalin on his return to Russia (for services rendered, I guess) Serrano Poncella died in exile in Venezuela in 1976, and since then Carnllo has tried to conveniently place the blame on him Unfortunately for the erstwhile CP chief, Claudin is still alive, and he too has just written a book wherein he repents his past sins and points the finger back at Carnllo Stalin's progeny ,what a crew...

...on assignment (Police officer or not, he must have been a brave man ) A few years later, though, a well-known psychoanalyst I met related an interesting incident that occurred at a cocktail party given by one of his colleagues in New York The host, after a few drinks, had regaled his guests with tales of his Spanish adventures how he had been drawn into association with the GPU and, ha, ha, had executed not a few enemies of the people I then thought that perhaps the two boasters were the same person Shortly afterward, I read a PhD dissertation by a scholar in California who said that during the course of his research he had come upon yet another ex-Lincoln member who had recalled "with relish how he mowed down 'the Trotskyite bastards' " in Barcelona in May Most recently, I heard of a different former Lincoln commissar who proudly made it known that when in Spain he killed " more Trotskyites than Fascists' All the happy storytellers were Lincolnian democrats, no doubt...

...Next, a campaign was mounted to prove that Nin and his coleaders, Juan Andrade and Julian Gorkm, were in the pay of Franco Letters were produced to try and nail the charge home The non-Communists in the Republican government did not accept this proof, however, and in fact it was later shown to have been forged In 1979, historian Burnett Bolloten put the he to rest forever with the documentary evidence he presented in The Spanish Revolution (a book that, despite the short shrift it received in the press, shares with the works of professor Stanley Payne of Wisconsin the distinction of being the finest American treatment of the period...

...I myself believed it might have been an American from the Abraham Lincoln Battalion who had done the deed A veteran of the unit I spoke to many years ago told me that on the way out of Spain with the last group of U S volunteers in '38, an American commissar had boasted to him that he was Nin's killer I didn't give my informant too much credence because I subsequently found out he had been a Chicago Red Squad detective sent into the Lincolns...

...BY WILLIAM HERRICK In the late 1930s, while the Spanish Civil War still raged, Mary McCarthy wrote a poignant short story entitled "Who Killed Andreu Nin9" Almost half a century later, the answer to that question appears to have finally emerged...

...The two books Cid was discussing are Ian Gibson's Paracuellos How It Was and Carlos Fernandez' Paracuellos Was Carnllo Guilty7 On November 7, 1936, Paracuellos was the site of a large-scale massacre of Rightist prisoners by the Republican police Fernandez writes that 1,125 unarmed captives were slain, Gibson accepts the figure of 2,400 put forward by the Franco regime (Hugh Thomas in his mammoth history of the Civil War estimates that approximately 140,000 civilians were murdered by both sides in the first few months of the conflict In and around Granada alone, the Falangistas and their allies killed some 4,500 Republicans and Socialists during August 1936 ). Responsibility for the Paracuellos atrocity has frequently been laid at the feet of Santiago Carnllo, who led the Spanish Communists for decades until stepping down after last year's elections But Gibson and Fernandez consider a number of other possibly guilty parties, including Mikhail Koltsov, the famed Russian journalist extolled by his friend Ernest Hemingway in For...

...Nin was the leader of the anti-Stahn-1st Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM) at the outbreak of the War At the same time as it fought against Franco, the POUM opposed the policies of the Spanish Communist Party and its drive to control the government of the Republic InDecemberl936,Stahnpro-claimed in Pravda that the struggle against Trotskyism in Russia would be extended to Spain and vowed that the Trotskyite POUM would be exterminated (Trotsky, meanwhile, condemned the POUM as centrist and vacillatory, "the chief obstacle on the road to the creation of a revolutionary party...

...The prison was guarded by members of the German Thaelmann Battalion and sundry other International Brigaders co-opted into the GPU under the cover of doing security work for the Servicio de Investigacion Militar, directed by Pedro / Gero (who, incidentally, ended up in exile in the USSR after the Hungarian uprising of 1956) It had long been assumed that these Germans executed Nin...

...William Herrick, a frequent contributor, is the author of Hermanos' and Shadows and Wolves, novels set in Spam...

...Now it appears that the murderer of Andreu Nin was neither a German Interbrigader nor an American braggart In the February 21 issue of the Spanish periodical Cambio 16, which has just reached me, Rafael Cid, reviewing two books about the Civil War states "The lover of Margarita Nelken, the Assault Guard Captain Valentin de Pedro, was to be the person who would later assassinate the leader of the POUM, Andreu Nin, in the sudden turn of the repression encouraged by Moscow and directed against enemies on the Left " So in Spain they finally know the answer to McCarthy's question...

...The Spanish Communists were then under the leadership of emissaries from the Soviet secret police, the GPU, plus the Italian Palmiro Togliatti (known in Spain as Alfredo), the Triestan Carlos Vitale (Contreras), and the Hungarian Erno Gero (Pedro) Their attempts to declare the POUM illegal were thwarted by the Prime Minister of the Republic Largo Caballero But they did succeed-on May 2,1937, when the war with the Fascists was still in delicate balance-in triggering a police action in Barcelona that provoked both POUMists and Anarchists into taking to the streets to protect themselves More than a thousand of the CP's adversaries died in the clashes, several POUM and Anarchist leaders were killed, and many more were imprisoned George Orwell in his masterful Homage to Catalonia described the events as he witnessed them When, in the wake of the slaughter, Caballero refused to sanction the Communist provocation or to acknowledge any culpability on the part of the POUM, Stalin issued an order that the Prime Minister was to be driven from office and replaced by the friendly Right-wing Socialist Juan Negnn This the CP was able to do...

...Several weeks after the battles in Barcelona, Nin was secretly arrested, and the Communist press in Spain and France explained his disappearance with reports that he had fled to Pans Who but a turncoat would run from the country, the Party organs went on to ask Few Spaniards believed the story Late in June Nin's body was said to have been discovered in a ditch outside of Alcala de Henares, the site of a GPU prison The corpse was never produced...

...Whom the Bell Tolls Koltsov, who was known simply as Miguel, was Stalin's personal agent in Spain...

...It should be remembered that the Communist line in Spain was for peace and democracy, and against fascism...

...Margarita Nelken, who was a Communist deputy in the Cortes when the Civil War started, also appears to have had some connection with Paracuellos Yet in the end, she-like the GPU agent Caridad Mercader, whose son assassinated Trotsky-evidently found it easier to get her man to do part of her share of the dirty work required by Stalin...