Stalin полностью

Franco had flown from the Grand Canary—on a chartered British plane—to Morocco, where he rallied Spain’s best fighting force, the ruthless Army of Africa (5,000 men of the Spanish Foreign Legion, 17,000 Moorish troops, and 17,000 Spanish conscripts).¹⁹ On July 17, they rose up in the coordinated coup. But on the mainland, the Nationalists gained the support of only about half of the Territorial Army, some 60,000 soldiers. Garrisons in key industrial cities—Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao—refused to join the rebellion. But the military plotters would not accept defeat. Mola became the rebel Nationalist commander in the north, Franco in the south. Colonial experience could cut in very different ways: Gandhi had gone to South Africa and returned to British India with the idea of a Congress Party and peaceful protest; Franco, from Spanish Morocco, brought back brutal counterinsurgency. He and Mola enacted the savage political cleansing (limpieza) of Franco’s Moroccan colonial war—only this time against fellow Spaniards.²⁰ To induce Republic-held territory to surrender, Nationalist troops engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Women in the tens of thousands had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves. Men were just shot, especially if found in possession of a trade union card. All the while, Franco obsessed over supposed international conspiracies of Freemasons, Jews, Communists.

Spain had last experienced major armed conflict when resisting Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Catalonia used the military’s putsch to carry out its own regional coup d’état against rule by Madrid, splitting the resistance. In Barcelona, in what was christened the Catalan Generalitat, a newly formed Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia competed with anarchists to arm workers in resistance, while the Republic government in Madrid reluctantly armed workers. These new militias radicalized domestic politics—the very outcome that the military putsch was supposed to forestall. Worker syndicates seized factories, and farmers formed collectives or redistributed land to individuals.²¹ In the greatest twist, despite the weakness of Spain’s right-wing party, inspired by fascism, the Falange (Phalanx), and its Communist party—each possessed fewer than 30,000 members in July 1936—Spain became a battleground in the international struggle between fascism and Communism.²²

GREAT POWER MACHINATIONS

Spain and the Soviet Union were remote from each other (the USSR accounted for 0.9 percent of Spain’s trade in the first half of 1936).²³ The Spanish Republic maintained normal diplomatic relations with just about every country in the world except the Soviet Union, and the putsch had looked unlikely to alter any of that.²⁴ France ought to have been Spain’s natural partner, especially after the June 1936 formation of a Popular Front government in Paris, which included Communists as well as Socialists under Prime Minister Léon Blum. Spain’s Popular Front government had already appealed to France’s Popular Front for military aid by July 18, and got a positive initial response from Blum, but pro-Franco personnel in Spain’s embassy in Paris leaked the request to France’s right-wing press, which launched a vicious campaign against Blum (a Jew as well as a Socialist). On a visit to London, moreover, Blum discovered that Britain opposed helping Spain’s elected government.²⁵ Britain had a great deal at stake: it accounted for 40 percent of total foreign investment in Spain, including the Rio Tinto mining conglomerate. But Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sought to avoid new government commitments, given the costs of maintaining the empire, or unwittingly facilitating a Communist takeover in Spain.²⁶ His stance was shared by even most of the Labour party and the trade union bosses.²⁷ Many British Catholics, meanwhile, admired General Franco’s stated program; much of British business sided with him as well. And so, on July 25, Blum reversed himself and agreed to join Britain’s policy of “non-intervention.” The hope was that the gambit would also take in Germany and Italy.²⁸