The Civil War, gold and Soviet military aid to the Spanish Republic (1936-1939)

The author aims to review the causes, course and consequences of the brilliant operations of Soviet intelligence services, conducted in October-November 1936 together with the Embassy of the USSR in Spain and representatives of the government of the Spanish Republic on the transport of the greater part of Spain's gold reserves to the USSR. On the basis of a comparative analysis of Russian and foreign studies on this issue, the author presents facts associated with the solution to the problem raised in the article. The Soviet leadership made a decision to supply weapons to the Spanish Republic after much hesitation on 14 September, the project assistance was codenamed "Operation X". As for the payment for Soviet military supplies in the fall of 1936, it is well known that there were no official payment documents. Most likely, there existed some informal agreement. On October 15 and 17, 1936, Prime Minister L. Caballero wrote two letters to M. Rosenberg, the Soviet Ambassador in Madrid. The letters contained a request for the transfer of the greater part of Spain's gold reserves to be deposited in the Soviet Union for international payments with the Soviet Union's participation in this process. The Politburo of the CC RCP (b) considered these two letters at its meetings on 17 and 19 October and adopted a separate decision for each of the letters. On October 20, a resident of the NKVD in Spain A. Orlov received a telegram from the head of the NKVD N. Yezhov, which contained a direct order of Stalin to organize the delivery of gold from Spain to the USSR on Soviet transport ships. In total, about 510 tonnes of gold, packed in 7 800 boxes, were transported. Along with the gold, four members of the Spanish government arrived in Moscow. They had a delicate mission: in collaboration with representatives of the Gokhran to open all the boxes and check the gold in them with the attached inventories. On February 5, 1937, the report on the amount of gold brought from Spain to Moscow was drawn up. The total weight of the gold, together with the other metals in the alloy, amounted to 510,079,529.3 grams, which corresponded to 460,516,851 gram of pure gold with an estimated market value of 518 million dollars. The gold was used by the government of the Spanish Republic to pay for the Soviet military aid (171 million dollars) and the purchase of arms and different materials in other countries. The author concludes that the shipment of the Spanish gold to the USSR was due to serious, objective reasons on the background of the civil war, that the operation for the transfer of the gold was carried out flawlessly, that weapons and materials paid for by this gold allowed the Spanish Republic to fight on equal terms with the combined forces of world fascism for a long time, that the absence of the Soviet payment documents, which reflect the price of weapons, materials and services, the exchange rate of gold for rubles and dollars, leaves the discussion of the effectiveness of the Soviet military aid open.

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