Reviews
By Daniel W. Michaels
Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck,
Grigory Sevostianov (eds.), Spain
Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, Yale
University Press, New Haven & London, 2001, 576 pp.
Stanley G. Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet
Union, and Communism, Yale University Press, New Haven &
London, 2004, 400 pp.
The received legend about the
Spanish Civil War tells the story about an embattled democratic republic
crushed by reactionary forces at home and the intervention of Fascist forces
from Germany and Italy. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Since the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the opening of many of its State records, several important
revisionist works have appeared in Spanish, French and English that reveal for
the first time the full extent of Communist influence and ultimate control of
the Spanish Republic. The Yale University series “Annals of Communism” continues
to lead the field in revealing the true nature and aspirations of international
communism in the 20th Century. The findings of the university’s
researchers today differ sharply from the image of the Soviet Union and its
activities presented to the American public during the Roosevelt
Administration.
Two new works from Yale have now
corrected many generally held misconceptions about what actually transpired in
Spain in the 1930s. The first book, Spain
Betrayed, is a collection of 81 previously unpublished documents
from the Russian Military Archives – reports from Soviet agents and advisers in
the field during the civil war. Each document is accompanied by a commentary by
one of the editors.[1] Two of the
more interesting of these documents are report (Doc. 60) by General Emilio
Kleber (aka Manfred Stern) and that by Georgy Dimitrov, Bulgarian Communist
leader, excerpts of which are given below.
The second book upon which this
review is based, is The
Spanish Civil War, by Stanley G. Payne. In it the author
synthesizes, updates, and draws further conclusions both from the materials
obtained from the Russian Federation,[2]
as well as from other previously overlooked sources, including Alien Wars: The Soviet Union’s
Aggressions against the World,[3]
the Spanish volume Queridos
camaradas,[4] and
the French source The
Passing of an Illusion, the Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century.[5]
On the basis of the above-listed
references, the Spanish Civil War is best described today as having been a
revolutionary-counterrevolutionary civil war. It was revolutionary in the sense
that the Spanish government – the Republic, which was loosely composed of
social democrats, Bolsheviks, anarchists, anarchosyndicalists, Trotskyites, and
other left-wing factions, was gradually taken over and run by Stalinist
Bolsheviks under direct orders from Moscow. It was counterrevolutionary in that
the conservatives, landowners, the Army, the Church, and the Falangists rallied
their forces to successfully retake the government from the Stalinists.
Anarchy, bickering, and political assassinations had characterized the Republic
in the decade before the actual civil war broke out. In fact, Spain was the
only country in the world with a mass movement of anarchists – the disciples of
Bakunin. The main weapon used by the left during this period was the general
strike; the weapon favored by the right was the pronunciamento– tantamount to mobilization
– declared by the military establishment. Moderation and compromise seemed not
to be a part of Spanish nature in those turbulent days. The actual civil war on
the battlefield broke out in July 1936 and did not end until April 1939 after
some 500,000 people had died in battle or by other means and another 400,000
were forced into exile.
The first general election of the
Second Republic (there were three, each successive one more Bolshevized than
the one that preceded it), gave a majority to a broad coalition of the
Republican Left – a middle-class radical party led by Manuel Azaña. In
September 1936 Largo Caballero, called the Spanish Lenin, became prime minister
of the wartime government, but by May 1937 was removed from office by the
Communists who installed Juan Negrín, nominally a Socialist but actually a
Stalinist stooge. Moreover, Negrín was known to be married to a Russian woman.
On the Nationalist side, Franco, generally called el caudillo (the leader), assumed
leadership. Franco had a reputation as a highly professional combat soldier.
Commissioned in the army at the age of eighteen, he had volunteered for service
in Morocco, where he distinguished himself in battle and won the respect of his
subordinates. At the age of thirty-nine, he had become the youngest general in
Europe since Napoleon Bonaparte. Perhaps the closest political analog to Franco
would be the estimable Antonio Salazar who governed (1932-1968) Portugal
concurrently with the Spanish ruler.
General Franco had
propagandistically been presented to the English-speaking world as a fascist.
In fact, Franco, was a conservative Catholic who rejected the Falangists (a
movement founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera and his father Miguel) and put
limits on their power. Franco’s authoritarian rule, called Franquismo, was totally
free of the anti-Semitism and racialism that usually accompanied typical
fascist movements.[6] Ironically,
it was the Republic practiced the only racism displayed in the Spanish War.
Posters and pamphlets issued by the Republic depicted Franco’s Moorish troops
as “thick-lipped, hideously grinning, powerful turbaned figures attacking defenseless
white women and bayoneting white children,” and worse.
Some observers still consider the
Spanish Civil War to have been the first battle of World War II. Rather it
seems now, with these new studies, to have been yet another incident of
revolutionary-counterrevolutionary civil war in the post-WWI and inter-war
period instigated by Communist attempts to subvert and overthrow the legitimate
governments of Europe. The civil war in Russia, in which the revolutionaries
emerged victorious, was the prime example and the only such civil war in which
the revolutionaries prevailed. Similar revolutionary attempts were made in
Finland, Bavaria, and Hungary, but were thwarted by counterrevolutionary
patriots in each of those countries. Moreover, further factors that separate
the Spanish experience from World War II were that during the Spanish Civil
War, Great Britain and France both maintained non-interventionist foreign
policies, while the United States was still in a state of shock having fallen
from the frenzied heights of the “Flapper Age” to the depths of the Great
Depression. Also, Spain remained neutral during World War II. And, finally, the
weaponry and tactics used in the Spanish Civil War more resembled those of WWI
than those of WWII. The Second World War only began when Britain and France –
in the firm expectation that the US and the USSR would soon join them –
declared war on Germany over a border dispute in Eastern Europe resulting from
the terms of the Versailles Treaty.
Five days after the fighting began,
Georgy Dimitrov, secretary of the Comintern, spelt out the basic Comintern and
Soviet policy in the Spanish Civil War:
“We should not, at the present
stage, assign the task of creating Soviets and try to establish the
dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain. That would be a fatal mistake.
Therefore we must say: act in the guise of defending the Republic. When our
positions have been strengthened, then we can go further. […]
The war cannot end successfully if the Communist Party does not take power in
its own hands.”
Part of the tragedy of the Spanish
Civil War, of course, was the fact that many honorable and decent men in the
Republic’s government – socialists, liberals, and the like – were gradually
swallowed up by the extreme Communist left. For example, the Spanish Socialist
Minister of the Navy and Air Force, Indalecio Prieto (Doc. 45), described a
Communist as, “not a human being – he’s a party; he’s a line, a person with an
unseen committee behind his back.” About the only glue holding the left together
was their common anti-fascism, and even that was specious. The Republic was not
only at war with the Nationalists, it was at war with itself.
To add to the general chaos,
concurrently as Stalin and the USSR was aiding the Republic, the Soviet tyrant
and his Bolsheviks was plotting and warring against the Trotskyites and other
political enemies at home and in Spain, where they were still quite
influential.
Because Spain in the 1930s was a
very poor and troubled country whose limited resources were sorely depleted by
a succession of Moorish Wars and The Great Depression, both warring parties
invited and welcomed foreign intervention. Although Spain remained neutral in
both world wars, the Spanish Army was constantly engaged from 1909-1926 against
Abd al Krim’s Riff Berbers in Morocco. The Soviet Union came to the aid of the
Republic while Italy and Germany responded by helping the counterrevolution. As
in Europe generally after World War I, Fascist parties promoting extreme
nationalism were formed as a reaction to Communist takeovers or to thwart
attempted Communist takeovers. With regard to Spain, the USSR was the only
foreign power to intervene politically in Spain before the Civil War. Historian
Payne states explicitly: “The USSR was the only power that had been intervening
systematically in Spanish affairs before the beginning of the Civil War,
operating its own political party within the country and at long last achieving
some success.”
The first official Marxist Party in
Spain was the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) established in 1879; the
[Stalinist] Communist Party of Spain (PCE) was formed in 1920 by amalgamating
several of the smaller left-wing parties. An anti-Stalinist Trotskyite Workers
Unification Party (POUM) was hastily assembled in 1935. As early as January
1919, with Lenin still alive and ruling, the first Comintern agent, Mikhail
Borodin (aka Mikhail Gruzenberg), arrived in Madrid accompanied by his
assistant Jesús Ramírez (aka Charles Phillips, an American socialist) to
organize the many splintered left-wing groups.
Under Stalin, Soviet personnel
assigned to Spain were chosen with care, although many of them could not
rightly not yet be called Stalinists. The Great Terror and purge of Trotskyites
was just getting underway in the mid-1930s and would be reflected in the fate
of some of Stalin’s appointments in Spain. (Those that were not able to defect
to the West were executed when they returned to the USSR). Stalin appointed
Marcel Rosenberg, who had been a delegate to the League of Nations, as
ambassador to Spain. General Jan Berzin (aka Peteris Kjusis) headed the
military staff dispatched to Spain. Berzin, who was the head of the GRU from
1924 to 1938, Soviet Military Intelligence, arrived in Madrid in 1936 and
became commander of Soviet Forces in the Spanish Civil War. Major General
Walter Krivitsky (aka Samuel Ginzberg) as NKVD rezident in the Netherlands was responsible
for Soviet military intelligence throughout Europe.
Aleksandr Orlov (aka Leiba Feldbin)
filled the most important post of NKVD intelligence chief and security control.
As NKVD rezident
in Spain, Orlov was charged with both intelligence collection and
counterintelligence. Orlov established the Servicio de Investigación Militar in
which he trained agents for the Soviet Union. The American spy Morris Cohen was
one of his students.
Stalin, who always prized the
importance of writers and filmmakers in shaping public opinion (he called them
‘engineers of the mind’), assigned his personal friend, Mikhail Koltsov, as the
Pravda
correspondent in Spain. Ilya Ehrenburg, another agitprop star, moved between
Paris and Madrid. Much of the propaganda coverage issued from Moscow was picked
up and echoed by Western journalists who either sympathized with the Communists
or were blind to what was going on. Thus, the propaganda, echoed and reechoed
in the world press, soon became the myths and legends of today. And were it not
for a small group of revisionist scholars, the myths and legends would have
become history.
The American media and
“intellectuals,” with few exceptions, were openly sympathetic to the Republic,
and succeeded in misleading many Americans into sharing their sympathies. They
were and remain heartbroken when the Communist revolution in Spain was
squelched. To this day, General Francisco Franco receives only negative
commentary in America. Famous journalists like Walter Duranty (N.Y. Times,
Herbert Matthews (N.Y. Times), and Louis Fischer (The Nation), who were better
propagandists than journalists, were very influential in disarming American
opinion about the threat of Communism. In literature and the motion picture
industry, the reality is, Payne notes, that if the Louis Jordan of Ernest
Hemingway’s For Whom the
Bell Tolls had ever existed, he would have been working for the
NKVD. “Mountains of mendacity,” was Paul Johnson’s phrase describing the
pro-Soviet lies that circulated about the Spanish Civil War. “No episode in the
1930s has been more lied about than this one.” Fortunately, better minds in the
U.S. Defense Department recognized the true value of Spain and Franco to the
defense of the West and hastened to include Spain in NATO in the 1950s.
Much has been written about the
International Brigades, totaling about 40,000 men recruited by the Communist
Parties in the West. In the early 1930’s Stalin had not yet removed Trotskyites
and other undesirables from his government. The Comintern was still very active
and Stalin, under its influence, supported the Popular Front movement in Europe
and the Americas. Communist Parties were asked to recruit volunteers to support
the Republic and demonstrate Communist solidarity. General Emilio Kleber, a
Soviet Commissar, acted as liaison between the Spanish Minister of Defense and
the French Communist Andre Marty, who was in charge of recruiting the
International Brigades in Albacete.
In the United States, the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade was at first made quite popular in the press as aiding the
Republic. Some of its members, after having experienced reality in Spain,
returned home disillusioned and later honestly reported what was actually
happening. One such was the novelist William Herrick, who wrote quite frankly:
“Yes, we went to Spain to fight Fascism, but democracy was not our aim.” During
the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade further
disgraced themselves by following Communist Party orders to oppose United
States’ entry into the war. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Brigade
again raised the Red Banner. Shortly after WWII, the Lincoln Brigade was put on
the U.S. Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. From Britain the
renowned George Orwell and other notables learned about Communism the hard way
in Spain.
What lessons did the major
interventionist powers draw from the Spanish Civil War? Surprisingly, the
authors tell us, the Soviet Union devoted an extraordinary amount of time in
reviewing the lessons learned there with respect to weaponry, tactics, and
strategy, assuming the Spanish experience would be the model for future
revolutionary wars. The Soviet Ministry of Defense published numerous books,
training manuals, and articles for the Red Army on their experience. On the
other hand, the German command concluded that the Spanish conflict was a
special kind of war from which it would be a mistake to draw any major new
conclusions or lessons. In the reviewer’s opinion, it would be wrong to
conclude that the USSR placed that much importance on the Spanish experience.
Perhaps, the Trotskyites did consider Spain important, expecting similar
revolutions in other Western countries, but Stalin and the Soviet Armed Forces
under Marshal Zhukov were already employing large-scale, deep penetration and
encirclement tactics, such as would be used in WWII, in the late 1930s in
Manchuria against the Japanese.
The Spanish Civil War, historian
Payne asserts in conclusion, was fought between extreme rightist and leftist
forces, neither of which wanted to create a modern liberal state. “The left
lost the military struggle but more often than not won the propaganda war.”
Through the successful propaganda war in which for many decades the Republic
was depicted as representing democratic government, Communists and Soviet
intelligence agents were able to operate almost without suspicion, especially
in Britain and the United States.
The veteran Stalinist NKVD official
Pavel Sudoplatov explained:
“Stalin in the Soviet Union and
Trotsky in exile each hoped to be the savior and the sponsor of the Republicans
and thereby the vanguard for the world Communist revolution. We sent our young
inexperienced intelligence operatives as well as our experienced instructors.
Spain proved to be a kindergarten for our future intelligence operations. Our
subsequent initiatives all stemmed from contacts that we made and lessons that
we learned in Spain. The Spanish Republic lost, but Stalin’s men and women
won.”
Author Payne confirms this
assessment:
“The Soviet institution that most
benefited from involvement in the Spanish war was the NKVD, which used the war
for deep penetration into the military and the political structures of the
Republic. They created cells, which they planned to expand significantly in
order to increase secret operations in other European countries and the United
States.”
By way of providing a consensus of
opinions based on a close review of all these recent investigations and access
to Soviet sources, historian Payne lists some of the main conclusions of
individual researchers:
The Soviet documents, Spanish
historians, and Payne all agree that Stalin – proceeding in his usual cautious
manner – intended by his intervention in Spain to convert that tortured nation
into the first Western “Peoples Republic,” a forerunner of the Peoples
Republics he later established in Eastern Europe. At times Western analysts
have mistaken Stalin’s innate cautiousness for a change in Soviet policy. In
reality, he rarely deviated from his ultimate intention even if it meant, “One
step backwards, two steps forward.”
The editors of Spain Betrayed (Radosh,
Habeck, and Sevostianov) conclude:
“As some historians have long
suspected, the documents prove that advisers from Moscow were indeed attempting
to ‘Sovietize’ Spain and turn it into what would have been one of the first
‘Peoples Republics,’ with a Stalinist-style economy, army, and political
structure.”
Antonio Elorza and Marta
Bizcarrondo, ending their careful study of Comintern policy, write, “the
process is well-known and was clearly outlined in the Spain of 1937. Thus,
without complete institutional similarity, it can be said that the policy of
the Comintern in Spain pointed, without doubt, to the model of the ‘Peoples
Democracy’.”
François Furet writes of the Spanish
Civil War:
“I do not consider it accurate to
write, as Hugh Thomas does,[7]
that after the anarchist defeat of May
1937 and the formation of the Negrín government, “two-counterrevolutions “ faced
each other: that of Franco and that led by the Spanish Communist Party, in the
shadow of the new prime minister. This definition suits Franco, but not the
other side. It is true that the Communists suffocated a revolution in
Barcelona, but only to substitute one of their own. They suffocated the popular
revolution, annihilated the POUM, subjugated Catalan separatism, regimented
anarchism, split the left and right of the Socialist Party – that is, Caballero
and Prieto, respectively, obliged Azaña and Negrín to follow them. But with
that the Spanish Republic had lost its spark. […] What
was being tested in Spain was the political technique of ‘Peoples Democracy’,
as it would be practiced in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945.”
Stalin’s favorite Spanish Communist,
Dolores Ibárruri (aka La Pasionaria) wrote in her autobiography years later
that in the Republican zone:
“The democratic, bourgeois Republic
was transformed into a Peoples Republic, the first in the history of
contemporary democratic revolutions.”
Senior Russian Army officers and
military historians, Sarin and Dvoretsky, conclude:
“Judging from numerous papers that
we have examined, Stalin began to see the Spanish government as some kind of
branch of the Soviet government obedient to dictates from Moscow. […] In this unnecessary war, many hundred of young Soviet men
suffered and died for no good purpose. Stalin and his team pursued an
unrealistic goal: to turn Spain into a Communist country beholden to the Soviet
Union as the first step to creating Communist governments in other countries of
the western world.”
The Communist Party explained its
defeat in Spain in terms of standard Stalinist shturmovshchina (policy of correcting
mistakes made in planning and organization based on the belief that Stalinist
Communism was infallible and any failure in policy had to be the result of
human error or treachery), namely, that the PCE had been defeated by its own
errors and failing to act with sufficient audacity. Among the many Stalin had
executed for their failure were Ambassador Rosenberg, the Russian Military
Attaché, Gorev, General Berzin, General Kleber, and countless unknown others
considered “enemies of the [Stalinist] State.”
Other factors were considered to
explain the Soviet intervention. Geopolitically speaking, a Communist victory
in Spain would have militarily outflanked Germany and seriously weaken its
position in Europe. Diplomatically, Stalin patiently renewed his attempts to
enlist Britain and France in a triple alliance against Germany. Apparently,
Britain at that time was not yet ready to conclude such an alliance, so Stalin
entered into the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact which provided an additional two
years for Stalin to put all his chips in order.
The Yale University “Annals of
Communism” series with its Russian-American collaboration has provided the best
insight into actual Communist plans and intrigues in the 20th
Century. In the case of Spain, it appears that Germany and Italy were quite
right to have intervened and upset Stalin’s plans.
Notes
[1] Radosh was a former Communist whose uncle fought on the
side of the Republic; Habeck is an assistant professor of history and
coordinator of the Russian Military Archive Project at Yale; Sevostianov is
senior researcher at the Institute of Universal History in Moscow.
[2] Payne is Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of
History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of fourteen
books, mostly on aspects of Spanish history.
[3] O. L. Sarin and L. S. Dvoretsky. Alien Wars: the Soviet Union’s Aggressions against the World.
Presidio, Novato, California, 244 pp.
[4] Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo. Queridos camaradas: la Internacional
Comunista y España, 1919-1939, Planeta, Barcelona, Spain, 1999, 532 pp.
[5] François Furet. The Passing of an Illusion: the Idea of
Communism in the Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999,
596 pp.
[6] Roger Griffin. Fascism. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, New York, 1995, p. 186.
[7] Hugh Thomas, The
Spanish Civil War. Modern Library (revised edition). New York, 2001, 1096
pp.
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