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Betrayed, is a collection of 81 previously unpublished documents from the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.
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