The historiographical earthquake.

Falcoff, Mark

The Spanish Civil War: the continuing controversy: I

Only recently, with the virtual passing of an entire generation, has the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) ceased to be a subject of passionate historical and ideological debate. Even so, the martyrdom of the Second Republic (1931-39) has inspired the construction of a remarkably enduring historiographical edifice. Its main lines are well known--that in Spain, the democratic West failed to meet the earliest challenges of European fascism in the guise of General Francisco Franco's military uprising against the government of the Popular Front. In so doing, it presumably emboldened Hilter and Mussolini to venture on to what became the Second World War.

At the same time, the Spanish conflict occupies a particularly important role in the apparently endless apologetics for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Whatever horrors the former may have inflicted on the latter, so the argument runs, in Spain at least the Soviets put Britain, France, and the United States to shame by expeditious support of the embattled republic. If the Soviets came to occupy a disproportionately important role in Spanish politics by 1939--again, we are told--the cause lay not in Moscow's ambitions so much as in the failure of countries who should have hastened to the aid of one of their own, rather than crouching behind a hypocritical posture of "nonintervention."

To be sure, almost from the very beginning this view of Spanish events was challenged by historians and participants alike. One such was George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (1938), a book whose literary excellence perhaps eclipses its crucial political message. Another was Walter Krivitsky, a defector from Soviet intelligence who died under mysterious circumstances in Washington shortly after publishing In Stalin's Secret Service (1939). Yet another was Jesus Hernandez, a former member of the central committee of the Spanish Communist party whose memoirs (evocatively tided To fui un ministro de Stalin) originally appeared in 1953.

In later years what might be called the Revised Standard Version was likewise attacked by historians left and right--from Trotskyists like Pierre Broue and Emile Temime to liberals like Stanley Payne, but also by E. H. Carr, generally known for his Soviet sympathies, and by Ricardo de la Cierva, perhaps the most accomplished of Spain's franquista historians.(1) For reasons probably more cultural and ideological than historical, however, the field has been dominated by people like Paul Preston, a British academic known among other things for a massive biography of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. As Preston himself points out in a survey of several recent monographs (The Times Literary Supplement, June 29), in recent years the main thrust of Civil War historiography in Spain has shifted to documenting the horrors of the Franco regime, both during and after the war.(2) This serves a number of useful purposes, the most important of which is to divert attention from the troubling questions that persist concerning the republic itself.

Alas for Preston and the Spanish historians of whom he happens to approve, these issues will not go away. After the demise of the Soviet Union, in 1991 and 1992, its military archives, as well as those of the Communist International, were suddenly made available to Western researchers. For some years now the Yale University Press has been publishing selections from this unprecedented source in its Annals of Communism series, much to the discomfiture of some extremely well-placed members of the American and British historical professions. Now comes Ronald Radosh, assisted by two scholar-archivists, to reveal what light such materials shed on Spanish events.(3)

The task itself was daunting, since it required the translation and careful perusal of hundreds of documents in several languages. This volume includes some eighty-one of them, together with a running commentary and notes. Some are very long; others are tedious in the recitation of their detail. A few provide particularly vivid pictures of a country in the midst of considerable political and military confusion. But taken together, they constitute something of a historiographical earthquake, vastly undercutting the long-standing arguments of generations of apologists for Stalin, the Comintern, the Spanish Communist party, and the republic's final prime minister, Dr. Juan Negrin.

Prior to the outbreak of the war, the Spanish Communist party was the smallest and least significant of the left-wing political groupings in Spain. In spite of nearly two decades of patient effort, the party had failed to make significant inroads in the hold exercised by the socialists and the anarchists, particularly over the two groups most likely to support a social revolution in Spain--the urban workers and the landless peasantry. Indeed, as late as 1936 Madrid did not even maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union! Three years later, however, Moscow was in virtual control of the Spanish government and was well advanced in its plans to convert the country into a precursor of the "peoples' democracies" that sprang up in Eastern Europe under Red Army protection after 1945.

How did this remarkable turn of events come to pass? Conventional wisdom has it that the rise of Communist influence in Spain was the product of Stalin's decision to provision the embattled republic with arms, particularly after Hitler and Mussolini poured arms and "volunteers" into the insurgent side. On the face of it, the proposition seems to make sense. Unfortunately, it falls somewhat short of the truth. A letter from Prime Minister Jose Giral to the Soviet ambassador in Paris, dated July 15, 1936, establishes that the republic sought to acquire arms from Moscow when there was still a possibility that France would honor its commitments to War Ministry purchases. Moreover, other documents reveal that the Soviet Union--far from "giving" weapons to the embattled republic, swindled it out of hundreds of millions of dollars. This it accomplished by demanding the prior deposit of a good part of the country's gold reserve in Moscow, and then, through the imposition of exaggerated exchange rates, charged almost double what guns, tanks, and planes should have cost. (On two aircraft alone, the Soviets bilked the republic out of $50 million--in the dollars of those days!) Much of the equipment was old and unusable, and some of the weapons were dispatched without ammunition. The Soviets also charged against the total the costs of feeding, transporting, and maintaining military advisers in the peninsula.

It is true that the Soviets set up dummy companies in many parts of Europe (and also in the United States) to buy weapons that were supposedly destined for transshipment to unnamed South American republics. But, in fact, some of these--including two airplanes ordered from the Douglas plant in the United States--though charged to the Spanish Republic, were sent to China to assist Mao Zedong. Unquestionably the perception--assiduously retailed in the Spanish Communist press, which mysteriously ballooned in size and importance after July 1936--that the Soviets were providing what the British, French, and Americans were cynically denying through the charade of "non-intervention" obscured the facts of the case.

Rather, the Soviets were able to advance their control of the republic through conventional Leninist means--by manipulating key government ministers like Julio Alvarez del Vayo, by creating a network of political commissars to control the armed forces, and by identifying and advancing the careers of compliant officers and effectively destroying those who resisted party and Soviet "advice." This was not always easy, and much of the book chronicles the difficulties encountered by the Soviet embassy, a bloated military mission, and the Communist party in their dealings with Spaniards whose loyalty was first and foremost to their own country-Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero, or Naval and Air Minister Indalecio Prieto, or Army Chief of Staff Jose Asencio. By 1938, however, all three had been replaced with officials more to the taste of Moscow, so that as the actual territory of the republic gradually shrunk, and the capital moved first from Madrid to Valencia and then to Barcelona, the Soviets were increasingly in control of the cabinet, the armed forces, and the police.

The process of getting rid of "uncooperative" Spanish officials was in some ways remarkably similar to what was going on in Russia itself during these years; those hostile to Stalin's rule, or whom Stalin imagined might become so, were accused not merely of Trotskyism and "wrecking" but actually of being agents of Hitler or Mussolini. Thus General Asencio could not be merely wrong or incompetent but a covert agent of Franco. Ironically, many of the very people Stalin dispatched to Spain to apply these techniques themselves fell into the same maw when, one by one, they were recalled to Moscow. One of the few exceptions, Alexander Orlov, escaped to the United States, later to provide one of the earliest authoritative testimonies of Stalin's activities in Spain.

The Stalinist purge carried on behind the lines of the Civil War was not merely about the need to get rid of ministers and generals insufficiently obedient to their Soviet advisers; it also responded to the need to eliminate other revolutionary forces in Spain, those of a different ideological hue-particularly in Catalonia, where anarchists were deeply rooted in the local political culture. The five-day street battle between Communists and anarchists in Barcelona in 1937 has already been told by George Orwell. What is new, however, are the documents (numbers 49-52 in Spain Betrayed) that reveal that the Spanish Communist Party, with the support and knowledge of the Comintern and Moscow, deliberately provoked the clash to eliminate their opponents. In theory the struggle between Communists and anarchists (and also the semi-Trotskyist POUM) turned on differences over grand strategy--whether it was best, as the Communists insisted, that the flames of revolutionary enthusiasm be dampened until after victory--presumably for fear of alienating the English and French governments--or whether, as the anarchists and the POUM believed, only a society already transformed into a republic of equals was capable of winning the war. In fact, however, these arguments were somewhat abstract and irrelevant; the real issue was political power and who would be left standing after the victory to dictate the shape of the successor state.

The German and Italian motives for intervention in Spain were partly ideological, partly strategic, and partly practical--to gain a new ally in Europe and to test out new weapons. But what of the Soviets? "At the present stage," wrote Comintern secretary-general Georgi Dimitrov within days of the outbreak of the war (July 23, 1936), "we should ... not assign the task of creating Soviets and try to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain. That would be a fatal mistake. Therefore we must say ... do not abandon the positions of the democratic regime in Spain at this point"--which is to say, until "the complete destruction of the fascist counter-revolutionary elements, and then we can proceed from there, resolving concrete questions" (emphasis added).

By the end of 1937 "concrete questions" had indeed been largely resolved. Although only two ministers in the Negrin government were members of the Communist party, fully 60 percent of army personnel were, including five of eleven corps commanders and fifty-six of seventy-two brigade commanders. The army's political commissars were either party members or recruited from among the ranks of pro-Moscow socialists. Moreover, the party's influence over the military was also accomplished through terror--non-Communist wounded were refused medical aid and non-cooperating officers were denied the weapons or ammunition they needed. Even more attention had been given to control of the police, with a party man becoming chief of security, replacing a Caballero appointee.

Moreover, Negrin himself had begun to think about a very different political design for Spain once the war was over. In a long conversation with the Soviet charge d'affaires in December, 1938, the prime minister allowed himself to speculate on the creation of a "distinctive new party." Negrin saw this as necessary because efforts to unify his own Socialist parry with the Communists had so far continually met with resistance from his colleagues. "But what kind of party?" the memorandum quotes him as asking rhetorically. For reasons of international image, it could not be a Communist party, though the Communists should give it workers "but not, at first, [figure] among its leaders--better to use little known people. The leaders of the new party's organization and propaganda work must be handed over to the Communists." Clearly, Negrin was thinking of something like what emerged as the Socialist Unity Party a decade later in East Germany.

The same document reveals that Negrin was also contemplating a very different political and economic system for postwar Spain than bourgeois democracy. "The bourgeois will not recover their positions," he told the Soviet diplomat, "All of the principal branches of Spain's economy will be nationalized." More remarkable still was his affirmation that there would be

 no returning to the old parliamentarism; it will be impossible to allow the
 "free play" of parties as it existed earlier, for in this case the Right
 might once again force its way into power. This means that either a unified
 political organization or a military dictatorship is necessary.

Negrin, the diplomat added, "does not see it any other way."

A Soviet intelligence report dated February 20, 1937 characterized the purposes of Hitler and Mussolini in Spain to be "to stifle the working masses of Spain, to set up a fascist regime there, and to turn Spain into a base and appendage of German and Italian imperialism." If these were in fact their objectives, the Nazi and fascist dictators succeeded in attaining the first two, but failed miserably in the last. In spite of enormous pressures, Hitler was unable to convince Franco to enter the Second World War on the side of the Axis. (The fact that the generalissimo's reluctance to do so had more to do with prudential rather than ideological considerations seems--at the end of the day--somewhat irrelevant.) Without for a moment minimizing the repression and bloodshed of the Franco years, these documents justify speculation on whether indeed a different outcome to the war would have had happier consequences for Spain--and indeed for the West in general. At the very least, they make it impossible for serious historians to continue to claim that what was at stake in Spain in 1936-39 was nothing more than fascism versus democracy--unless, of course, one regards Communism as an exotic variant of the latter, which unfortunately many still do.

One cannot conclude this review without paying particular tribute to Ronald Radosh. This book represents yet another milestone in his remarkable career as a major historian of the twentieth century. To Spain Betrayed, as indeed in all his work, he brings a sharp critical intelligence, an uncompromising honesty, and above all an exemplary courage to confront the cherished myths of the left. It is regrettable, but not wholly surprising, that after a lifetime of productive and important work, the history department at George Washington University decided recently that he was apparently not sufficiently accomplished to deserve a place in it--an episode that illustrates once again the fecklessness and mediocrity that has come to characterize the American historical academy.

(1) Also worthy of mention is La guerra civil espanola: una historia differente (Plaza y Janes, 1996), by the heterodox Argentine-Spanish leftist historian Horacio Vasquez-Rial, which has not received anything like the attention it deserves.

(2) "An awareness of guilt: Repression, vengeance and the destruction of incriminating evidence in Franco's Spain." By way of a preemptive strike, Preston begins the piece by attacking the straw man of Western apologists for Franco--nowadays, at least, a species as rare as the unicorn--before bludgeoning readers with the Revised Standard Version.

(3) Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary W. Harbeck, and Grigory Sevostianov; Yale University Press, 537 pages, $35.

Mark Falcoff's books include The Spanish Civil War, 1936-39: American Hemispheric Perspectives (with Fredrick B. Pike).