Posted on 01/12/2005 10:52:22 AM PST by robowombat
July 16, 2001/Vol 6, Number 41 The Red and the Black The end of the myth of the Spanish Civil War By Stephen Schwartz
The Spanish Civil War—the conflict from 1936 to 1939 between the mainly socialist and anarchist militias defending the Spanish Republic, and the right-wing forces headed by General Francisco Franco—is often described as the last purely idealistic cause of the twentieth century. Certainly this is how the intellectual tradition of the Left remembers it. For radical writers, theorists, and activists in America and England, nothing looms larger than those days when pure-hearted idealists from around the world went to Spain to help the leftist Spanish government resist the forces of Fascism and oppression.
Which means there's something almost sad, like shaking a child awake from a pleasant dream, about the appearance of Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, the latest entry in Yale University Press's extraordinary Annals of Communism series. Edited with commentary by Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck, and Grigory Sevostyanov, the volume consists of over five hundred pages of documents discovered in Russian archives. It will effect a complete overturn in historical perceptions of the twentieth-century Left. With the appearance of Spain Betrayed, the last undefiled temple of the Marxists and their admirers has been permanently undermined.
On March 2, 1938, Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to fellow novelist John Dos Passos that for pure mean-spiritedness would be hard to exceed. In it, Hemingway accused Dos Passos of selling out, for money, the Spanish cause they had both embraced: "When people start in being crooked they usually end up being crooked about everything. . . . Honest Jack Passos'll knife you three times in the back for fifteen cents and sing Giovanezza [the fascist anthem] free. . . . There's always work . . . for anyone who thinks as you do."
The cause of Hemingway's polemic was a series of articles Dos Passos had published after returning from the territory controlled by the Republican forces, in which he exposed the extent of Soviet domination—and betrayal—of the Spanish Republic. The prime example for Dos Passos was the disappearance of his Spanish translator, José Robles, a professor at Johns Hopkins who had gone to Spain, like Dos Passos, to serve the Republic. In a sequence of events still unelucidated today, Robles fell afoul of Soviet agents and vanished, never to be seen again.
Dos Passos had gone to Spain as a valued literary asset, but while he searched for clues to the Robles case, he met a Soviet commander known as "Walter." He reported on this encounter in Partisan Review, the New York organ of the dissident left intellect, and Hemingway lambasted him for referring to the officer as a "Russian general." Hemingway wrote, "The only trouble about this, Dos, is that Walter is a Pole. . . . You didn't meet any Russian generals."
This exchange between a pair of American authors is relatively unimportant, of course, but it stands as a microcosm of the historical controversy that has surrounded the Spanish Civil War since it ended more than sixty years ago. One remarkable feature of this debate is that it has been fought exclusively on the Left; almost no intellectuals outside Spain have come forward to defend Franco, who won the war and ruled the country as a dictator for some thirty-five years. To Hemingway, the war involved resistance to the interventionist forces of Hitler and Mussolini, in which the Soviets were heroes and the Spanish people were bystanders, rather like extras in a film. Hemingway would eventually denounce the Communists, but he could not admit his own complicity in promoting them.
For Dos Passos, the fate of the Spanish, particularly the non-Communist Left, was paramount. The distortion of their struggle by the Communists, as well as the political murders the latter committed freely in Spain, marked a personal watershed: He would never again trust radical ideology.
Each of these interpretations had active partisans in the decades that followed. They included foreign volunteers who had gone to Spain to fight rather than, like Hemingway and Dos Passos, to write, but who broke into bitterly opposed factions. A group of Americans, overwhelmingly drawn from the Communist party and its fronts, had enlisted in the Moscow-controlled detachments in the Spanish Republican army, known as the International Brigades, and defended a Soviet-line mythology about the war. They had served in a separate unit, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion (whose name, inflated enough in its identification with an American president, they would in memory further inflate by calling their battalion a "brigade"). They insisted the Communists had been the best, if not the only, fighters; that nearly all others (especially the numerous anarchists and the members of a small, anti-Stalin Marxist group, the POUM or Workers' Party of Marxist Unity) were ineffective, cowardly, or traitorous; and that the conflict involved purely "liberal" goals. The Republicans, they claimed, defended an "elected, legitimate government," which was not even leftist, against a German and Italian invasion.
On the other side of the debate were those like George Orwell who fought alongside the Spanish rank and file, in a militia column of the execrated POUM. To Orwell and those like him, the Communists were sinister opportunists who sought to divert the conflict from its original, social-revolutionary aims. Indeed, Orwell saw in the war the end of the historic, high-minded tradition of European socialism and the triumph of Soviet totalitarianism within the international Left.
In general, the split between Stalin's supporters and opponents reflected a division between cynics and idealists. As depicted in a devastating memoir by the left-wing writer Josephine Herbst, The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, Hemingway shrugged off the liquidation of Dos Passos's friend Robles, while reveling in his supplies of food and other luxuries in Madrid, a city under siege in which a slice of dry bread was the typical daily ration. Herbst described herself and Dos Passos sharing the meager fare of Spanish militiamen, and virtuously declining when Hemingway leaned over the banister in his hotel and called them to breakfast, the odors of bacon, eggs, and hot coffee wafting around him.
For Hemingway, Stalinism was a form of masculine affirmation, comparable to bull-fighting, big-game hunting, or deep-sea fishing. The American veterans of the Lincoln Battalion shared this hard-shell outlook, which they have maintained as they die off, a dwindling band who denounce Orwell, not Franco, as their enemy.
By Franco's death in 1975, however, the battle of historical memory within Spain had clearly been won by the anti-Stalinists. The Muscovite claim that the war was a pure and simple struggle between democracy and international fascist aggression is largely absent from the contemporary Spanish historical discourse, in which the conflict of the 1930s is typically referred to as "la revolución." While a (right-wing) Spanish government recently granted citizenship, in a complicated bureaucratic process, to surviving International volunteers, that action was as perfunctory as it was sentimental. Much more illustrative of post-Franco Spanish reality was the election in 1984 of Ramón Fernandez Jurado to the Catalan regional parliament; forty-six years before, he had been the victim of Communist attacks as a POUM militia leader.
Neither Hemingway, nor the Lincoln Battalion combatants, nor Dos Passos, nor Orwell, would have been likely to predict such outcomes; for them, the Stalinist vision of the Spanish war, whether they loved it or hated it, seemed destined to prevail. And certainly, that picture—the dominant myth, outside Spain, for decades—answered the need of foreigners for a simplistic account, and it remained. It is difficult to imagine them anticipating that, sooner or later, at least some part of the Soviet archives would be opened—much less that it would be opened to non-Communists, and that a volume like Spain Betrayed would be the result.
It turns out that Dos Passos, not Hemingway, was right after all—as demonstrated by a report from the Pole "Walter," whose real name was Karol Swierczewski, and who, regardless of his nationality, was indeed a Soviet general. The vindication of the anti-Stalinist position on Spain does not end there. As presented in these documents, the role of the Communists, both foreign and domestic, and their role in the Spanish Republic, is appalling.
The aim of Moscow from the beginning proves to have been to take the Republic out of the hands of the non-Communist Spaniards, whether socialist or anarchist, and deposit it with Stalinist cadres. As it happens, the Communists, who had almost no following in Spain's labor movement, never gained the backing of the Spanish masses, even in the heat of the war. The Russians and their agents, notwithstanding their arrests, assassinations, and other, subtler means, never succeeded in completely suppressing their leftist critics, among either anarchists or the POUM.
As late as November 1938, Erno Gero, a sinister Hungarian sent to Spain to coordinate Soviet transformation of the Spanish regime into a "people's republic," complained that anti-Soviet socialists and anarchists, along with the "Trotskyists" of the POUM, had launched "a strong offensive . . . against the Communist Party" and its influence over the government. In one of many extraordinary admissions, Gero noted the "fear of Communists that exists in the various parties and institutions . . . owing to the growth of the Communist party's influence . . . especially in the army." The Russians' effort to destroy their left-wing rivals and gain advantage for their Spanish pawns had failed.
The character of the International Brigades, including their American participants, is equally discredited from the mouths of the Soviet functionaries. General Walter—the same one Dos Passos had met—pointed out that the fifteenth brigade, which included the Americans, was top-heavy with command staff, adding dryly, "one of the most important concerns of the command must be finding useful work for this platoon of officers." The English-speaking volunteers (including British and Canadians) seemed to have thrown away their bayonets, apparently on the assumption they would not have to do any real fighting, and did not know how to keep their rifles clean. "There was only a handful of cleaning rags in the brigade," Walter commented.
But the most shocking element of the picture, especially for those who for sixty years have witnessed the Lincoln veterans preening themselves for their antifascist virtue, consists of the marked discrimination practiced by the foreign volunteers among themselves, as well as against the Spaniards. A Soviet officer of worldwide fame in his time, under the combat alias "Kléber," commented that the "international" officers treated the Spanish troops "as the officers of the imperialist armies related to the soldiers in the colonial armies."
According to Walter, the International Brigades, inspired by slogans of worldwide unity against Fascism, were plagued by a "petty, disgusting, foul squabble about the superiority of one nationality over another. . . . Everyone was superior to the French, but even they were superior to the Spanish, who were receiving our aid and allowing us to fight against our own national and class enemies on their soil." Anti-Semitism was a serious problem among these "progressive" fighters. Above all, the International Brigades possessed transport, food, and other supplies far in excess of their Spanish counterparts, with whom they resolutely refused to "share their wealth." Walter observed "mountains of ammunition thrown out as unwanted, although that same materiel would have met the needs of Spanish brigades."
In later years, the Lincoln veterans always seemed to refer to a Spanish war completely separate from that experienced by the Spanish people. General Walter's reporting confirms that this was so: "We internationalists live our own isolated life," he wrote. International Brigade officers accounted exactly for the numbers of foreigners killed and wounded in battle, but "never knew of the casualties of the Spanish personnel."
British and American volunteers, receiving plentiful food and cigarettes from home, paid no attention to the fact that Spanish troops went for long periods of time without tobacco—a demoralizing factor in any war. It is perhaps characteristic that, in recent years, the surviving Lincoln veterans have exulted in the Spanish government's offer of recognition to the remaining International Brigaders, but ignore the fact that no veteran's benefits have been awarded to the thousands of Spanish survivors of the Republican Army.
The well-equipped foreigners, Hemingway with his food hoard and the Lincoln volunteers with their Lucky Strikes, could not win the Spanish war, no matter what their intoxication with police powers and ideological control. Agents and accomplices of Russian imperialism seeking to colonize Spain, they prevented a victory by the starving, self-sacrificing Spanish militias, who held out for three years. These forgotten, ordinary, Spanish heroes—thanks in very great part to Radosh and his team of collaborators, Yale Russian translator Mary R. Habeck and Moscow archivist Grigory Sevostyanov—may now attain, outside Spain, their rightful place in history.
By Stephen Schwartz
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Good article. I was so disgusted by the honorary citizenship extended to these poseurs.
But somethng else should be added: "The Myth of the End of the Spanish Civil War." It's being revived right now by Zapatero, who is doing almost precisely the things that the left did prior to the Civil War, which essentially provoked it. I think we're going to see it again in our day, further complicated by the designs of the Muslims upon that country (ZP is already running around building mosques, so I guess we know who's side they'll be on). And, then as now, he has the support of all the literary twits out there, both Spanish and foreign.
FWIW Orwell touched on some of these themes in his non-fiction, mainly in letters.
He grew disillusioned by the rampant corruption and the seeming betrayal of whatever ideals these fighters were supposed to have.
IIRC though it was not ideological reasons that finally took him off the line, but being shot in the throat.
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I proudly defend Franco, who defeated the communists in Spain, and then declined to join the Axis in WW2.
Years ago, when in college, I proposed to do a research paper on the Spanish Civil War. The professor gently tried steering me towards some other subject, because, as he insisted, "There were never so many lies about any event [in Europe during the mid-20th century] than that event, and you'll be going around in circles. Everything about that war, on both sides, was lied about. There's nothing to 'research' but lies."
I did the paper anyway, and the professor was right. I came to the weak conclusion that it was a good thing Francisco Franco had won--the milder of two evils--but man, even 40 years after the event, the purely factual material was sparse, if not nonexistent.
Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" is one of the great owrks of modern writing. It tells the story of the Communist betrayal of their "allies" and marks Orwell's loss of faith in socialism. Highly recommended. Spain is a terrific country (I have been their twice) and the Spaniards will get past their current government, no less than we outlasted the Clintons.
Bump for later reading. It's interesting how so much of the rhetoric of the Left never changes, and how so much of what passes for contemporary leftist thought can be traced right back to the world's most prolific mass murderer - Josef Stalin.
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works - yikes!
Nothing the leftists complain about concerning Franco compares to what the communists did in Spain. They desecrated graves, killed people for being Catholic, and generally plundered the countryside.
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Agreed! Franco also modernized Spain's economy while preserving her morality. Arriba Espana! Viva Franco!
Things don't change.
At that time Stalin considered those on the left who did not support him a bigger threat to the Soviet Union than any fascist. He was much more worried about Trotsky than Hitler.
I highly recommend the following book on the Spanish Civil War:
The Last Crusade: Spain: 1936
by Warren H. Carroll
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