After the end of the Second World War, the USSR actively joined the international campaign against the "last relic of fascism" – Franco’s regime in Spain. In particular, it supported a guerrilla movement organized by the Spanish Communists within the country, with the movement’s bases located in the South of France. The article the author analyses the reasons, circumstances, and significance of the meeting between the USSR leader Joseph Stalin and a delegation of prominent Spanish Communists, headed by the Secretary General Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, which took place at a crucial historical moment, in the summer of 1948. By this time, in the context of the outbreak of the Cold War and the strengthening of Franco’s regime, the so-called "Spanish question" had lost its urgency. However, for Stalin, who very rarely personally met with the Communists of the West, it was important to find out the political mood of the Spanish Communist Party’s leaders, especially since some of them had established close contacts with the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the "revisionist" Josip Broz Tito. A recently declassified recording of the meeting allows to answer a number of questions that have already been raised many a time. The article refutes the point of view established in the scholarly literature that it was the Soviet leader who ordered to curtail the anti-Franco guerrilla struggle in Spain, which had negative consequences. The author comes to the conclusion that the leaders of the Spanish Communist Party, understanding the futility of the guerrilla war, but at the same time unwilling to take responsibility for its termination, decided to use the meeting with Stalin as a pretext for a radical change in their tactics against the regime of General Franco.