Moscow's Gold Standards

Between midnight and 2 a.m. one October day in 1936, a line of trucks two blocks long stood outside the ornate portals of the Bank of Spain, in Madrid's Calle Alcala. Bank employees, under the guard of picked Communist militiamen, loaded the trucks with 510 tons of gold, in bullion and coins--the bulk of the Loyalist gold hoard--worth 1.734,000,000 gold pesetas ($566 million). Although Spain's civil war was only three months old, Nazi intervention had made the Soviet-backed Loyalist position shaky.

On the outskirts of Madrid, the truck drivers were changed. The new drivers were told that the cargo was high explosives. The convoy reached Cartagena, where the heavy gold-filled cases were put aboard a Russian ship.

Appointment in Odessa. The move was so secret that not even Defense Minister Indalecio Prieto was informed of this destination. Prieto found out about it only because he happened to be in Cartagena on business. The maneuver had been worked out by Juan Negrin, the pro-Communist Foreign Minister of the Largo Caballero government, in cahoots with Marcel Rosenberg, the Soviet ambassador, and Arthur Stakheevsky, Soviet economic adviser in Madrid (both of whom were later purged by Stalin).

The four Spanish guards on the Russian ship assumed that the gold would be taken to some southern French port, near but safe. Instead, the ship dropped anchor at Odessa, on the Black Sea. The Loyalist government in exile made several demands on Moscow for the return of the gold. So did the victorious Franco government in Madrid. Moscow spurned both claimants. Shortly after receiving the treasure, the Russians announced "a sharp increase in the Soviet Union's goldmining production," and Russia became an exporter of gold.

For Russian Help. This month, in one of those outbursts of recriminations that occur in Mexico City's colony of Spanish ex-Loyalists, Indalecio Prieto stirred up the long-buried story of the gold hoard, accused his fellow exile, Juan Negrin, of complicity. This time, Franco's Spain picked up Prieto's accusations. In formal notes to the U.S., Britain and France, Franco's Foreign Minister protested against Russian use of the Spanish gold in European trade. Since the Russians have undoubtedly melted down the coins and removed the Spanish mint marks from the bullion, it was hard to see how Madrid could identify the gold in question with Spain's lost treasure of the civil war. By extorting this secret kickback from the Loyalists, the Communists, though on the losing side, came out of the war with a clear profit.

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