Moscow Gold (Spain)

The rebels (also known as the Nationalists) under the leadership of a junta (Generals Emilio Mola, José Sanjurjo and Francisco Franco) established negotiations with Italy and Germany in order to seek material support for the war effort.

[1] On the same day in which the policy of non-intervention of the Western democracies was confirmed, Adolf Hitler gave his consent for the sending of a first shipment of aeroplanes, crew and technical personnel to the Nationalist side in Morocco.

Shortly after, Benito Mussolini approved the shipment of a load of cargo aeroplanes and other supplies that would be later used to transport the Nationalist troops stationed in Africa to the Nationalist-controlled city of Seville on July 29.

Towards the end of September 1936, communist parties of different countries received instructions from the Comintern and from Moscow for the recruitment and organization of the International Brigades, which would enter active combat during the month of November.

According to Viñas, the exceptional situation created by the Civil War caused the change in attitude by the Government with respect to the Cambó Law, which moved on to exercise the necessary measures to carry out a "partial undercover nationalization" of the Bank of Spain.

But the issue principally to point out is the consequences of this operation in judicial terms, as they have been undertaken openly in violation of the fundamental precepts of the currently in force Ley de Ordenación Bancaria, it is evident that they lead by their manifest illegality of the inexcusable conclusion of their nullity, which is to reach in its civil effects as many persons, national or foreign, that have participated in them, with independence to their criminal responsibility, already regulated in a separate Decree.

Based on the aforementioned considerations, in agreement with the Council of Ministers, and on the proposal of the Ministry of Finance, I hereby ordain, in confidentiality, the following: The decree was also signed by the President of the Republic of the time, Manuel Azaña, who would later affirm that the final destination of the reserves was unknown to him.

Many authors, such as Viñas, have pointed out that the decision to transfer the gold reserves outside of Madrid was motivated by the rapid advance of the Army of Africa (commanded by Nationalist General Francisco Franco) which, since its landing on the Spanish mainland, had incessantly marched forward towards the capital.

One of the main protagonists in these events, Prime Minister Largo Caballero, argued that the transfer of the gold reserves was necessary because of the Non-Intervention Pact and the defection of democratic states previously favourable towards the Republic, which left Madrid under threat from the Nationalist forces.

Since I am sure that Largo Caballero, of whom I was an intimate friend, was not in such a state of hopelessness with regard to the final outcome of the war, and it is hard for me to believe that Negrín also fell victim to such discouragement, I find no other alternative but to return to the hypothesis of Soviet coercion, or to simply declare that the transfer of the gold to Russia was a completely inexplicable madness.The intentions of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI, Iberian Anarchist Federation) of assaulting the vaults of the Bank of Spain to transfer the gold reserves to Barcelona, the main bastion of the FAI, were also discussed.

[43] While the majority of historians consider Minister of Finance Negrín the primary actor of the transfer (either by his own initiative or by the manipulation of the Soviets, depending on different interpretations), it is not clear who first had the idea of sending the reserves outside of Spain.

The British historian Antony Beevor cites versions that attribute to the Soviet agent Arthur Stashevski the suggestion to Negrín of establishing a "gold account" in Moscow, due to the threat posed on Madrid by Nationalist forces and the need to purchase matériel and raw materials.

The city of Cartagena was chosen because, in the words of historian Angel Viñas, "it was an important naval station, adequately supplied and defended, somewhat distanced from the theatre of military operations and from which the possibility of transporting the reserves through a maritime route somewhere else was available.

On October 20, the director of the NKVD in Spain, Alexander Orlov, received a ciphered telegram from Stalin,[61] ordering him to organize the shipment of the gold to the USSR, and he agreed on the preparations with Negrín.

I truthfully told the Minister of Finance Negrín that if anyone were to find out about it, if the anarchists intercepted my men, Russians, with their trucks full with Spanish gold, they would kill them and it would be an enormous worldwide political scandal, that could even provoke an internal revolution.

On October 22, 1936, Francisco Méndez Aspe, Director-General of the Treasury and Negrín's "right hand" man, came to Cartagena and ordered the nocturnal extraction of the majority of gold-containing boxes, of an approximate weight of seventy-five kilograms each, which were transported in trucks and loaded onto the vessels Kine, Kursk, Neva and Volgoles.

The gold, protected by the 173rd regiment of the NKVD, was immediately moved to the State Depository for Valuables (Goskhran), in Moscow, where it was received as a deposit according to a protocol, dated November 5, by which a reception commission was established.

[76][77][78] Negrín signed 19 consecutive sell orders between February 19, 1937 and April 28, 1938, directed to the successive People's Commissioner of Finance: G. F. Grinko (until May 1937), V. Tchoula (until September 1937) and A. Zverev (until the end of the war).

With the Spanish gold deposited in Moscow, the Soviets immediately demanded from the Republican government payment for the first deliveries of war supplies, which had apparently arrived as a gift to combat international fascism.

According to José Giral, even though the payments for arms and weapons had been fulfilled, the Soviet Union would not send any supplies if the government of the Republic "did not agree to first appoint important communists to police and military positions.

The exiled PSOE grouped the leaders of the three political leanings that had divided socialism during the conflict, Julián Besteiro, Indalecio Prieto and Largo Caballero, clearly aligned with an anti-communist and anti-Negrín orientation.

"[111] In January 1955, during the high point of McCarthyism, the American magazine Time reported on the accusations of Indalecio Prieto and other exiled Republicans in Mexico towards Juan Negrín and his "complicity" with the Soviets in the "long-buried story of the gold hoard".

As of January 8 of 1955 Mr. Minister of Foreign Affairs has been addressed, by Note signed by the Diplomatic Representatives of various countries of Europe and the United States of America denouncing the seizure carried out by the reds and the payments that, according to information from authorized sources, the Russians make with the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain."

According to the information received, the Spanish government made numerous payments for its foreign purchases and gave instructions for currency transactions, that were executed by the Bank of the Soviet Union.

Another controversy raised in this regard is the justification of a transfer to Mexico of assets seized by the General Reparations Fund at the end of the war, which included, among other things, "Bank of Spain deposits and gold bars".

[130] With respect to Olaya Morales, exiled anarchist during the Francoist regime, in all of his works he described the administration of Negrín as criminal and denies the arguments and theories of Ángel Viñas, considering the "gold issue" a gigantic fraud and one of the most important factors in the Republican defeat.

Authors like Fernando García de Cortázar,[131] Pío Moa[16] or Alberto Reig Tapia[132] have defined the Spanish episode of the Moscow Gold as mythical, used to justify the disastrous situation of post-war Spain.

Without ceasing our protests on the international stage, and without ending our efforts to recover the metal, we consider that we must adopt energetic measures without further delay, with coercive force, in order to prevent those that have tried to inarticulate the fiduciary circulation from fulfilling and aggravating their baneful objectives, benefiting from the same credit titles that they themselves looted...

The common exiled, the common people, were the red assassins of the war [...] The reserves of the Bank of Spain, which the Republic had to devour the last ounce of it to purchase arms and supplies around the world so as to not tumble in the battlefields, which Negrín had transported to Russia and converted into aeroplanes, tanks, pieces of artillery and guns with which to fight the rebel army and their allies, those gold reserves of the Bank of Spain that were soon transformed, in the eyes of the Spaniards of the post-war, in the spoils of war of the Republicans, in a mythical narration of greed and delinquency that allowed the victors to deafen the sore voice of the exiled.

The people always demand those guilty, and Franco and his accomplices focused all of their evils and misfortunes in a specific, visible, shootable enemy: the mason, the red, the liberal politician, the communist... who had bloodstained the fields of the Peninsula and pillaged the treasure of Spain and had taken refuge from their crimes abroad.