You see, I didn't take Zaragoza, I didn't get killed and I didn't become a Marxist. Everything is still ahead of us," - according to Mikhail Koltsov, Buenaventura Dorothy joked when she met him in Madrid.
On November 14, 1936 Koltsov wrote in the "Spanish Diary": "The Catalan column led by Dorothy has arrived. Three thousand men, armed and well equipped, outwardly completely different from the fantastic warriors who surrounded Dorothy at Boujarlos." Dorothy, a mechanic worker and leader of the Catalan anarchists, has been fighting on the Aragonese front near Zaragoza since the summer - there, in Bojarlos, Koltsov met him back in August. In the picture - Dorothy was right on the Aragon front in August 1936.
In Madrid, the anarchist asked for a military adviser, and he got Xanty. Under this name, as the commentary to the 1987 edition explains, Hadji-Omer Mamsorov, later a lieutenant colonel and hero of the Soviet Union, fought. "Ksanti is the first communist in Dorothy's parts," Koltsov writes. Dorothy greeted him like this: "You are a communist. Okay, let's see. you will always be by my side We will have dinner together and sleep in the same room. Let's see." And when Xanthi asked to teach soldiers how to shoot a machine gun in his spare time, he replied: "I want too." Train me to use a machine gun."
True, not everything goes well with Koltsov's numbers. According to an analysis published on the Voice of the Representative website, Dorothy himself and the Minister of Justice, also an anarchist, Juan Garcia Oliver, arrived in Madrid on November 14, and the column entered the city only on the 15th. And there were about 1,700 people in it, not three thousand. The author of the analysis suggests that Koltsov mixed up Dorothy's men with another Catalan column, Libertad-Lopez Tienda.
That day another entry appeared in the diary - about Captain Antonio, a Republican pilot, who the day before on the ground he mistook for an enemy.