The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 полностью

The split between Spanish intellectuals was more complex. Many had gone into exile, appalled both by the nationalist right and the revolutionary left. On the whole, the best known and the majority of those who had stayed in Spain supported the Republic.¹⁷ Literary output during the war was very uneven, with some strong poems and mostly disappointing novels.¹⁸ The republicans devoted great efforts to popular culture through organizations such as the theatre section of the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas and the company ‘New Scene’, which had writers of the calibre of Rafael Alberti, José Bergamín and Ramón J. Sender preparing material for it.¹⁹ There were also the Militias’ Cultural Service, the ‘Front Loud-Speaker’, The ‘Guerrillas del Teatro’. Every sort of medium was used–books, pamphlets, press, radio, cinema and theatre.

Behind the lines, political organizations and unions produced a wide range of newspapers. At the front, almost every army corps, division, brigade and sometimes even battalions, produced their own publication.²⁰ But perhaps one of the most innovatory methods of propaganda was the use of posters, urging loyalty and confidence in victory as well as warning against spies and venereal disease. They were known as ‘soldiers of paper and ink’.²¹ Poster art, especially the Soviet example, had had a great influence in artistic circles even before the civil war. The Republic made use of the best poster designers in Spain, while the nationalists had comparatively few of any merit.²²

Both sides made all possible use of radio stations for information, recruiting and propaganda.²³ The republicans, however, deployed the cinema with great effect. Right from the start of the war, cinemas screened a series of Soviet films. Chapaev, the heavily romanticized story of a red partisan hero of the Russian civil war, was shown the most. He urged the peasants to defend the revolution and died heroically at the end. In Spain, however, they often left out the last reel to bolster their audiences with the impression that Chapaev had survived.

The other film which caught the imagination of the Spanish communists was The Sailors of Kronstadt, by Yefim Dzigan, which depicted the transformation of a group of anarchist sailors from the naval base of Kronstadt into a disciplined unit of the Red Army. Needless to say, anarchists who knew the truth about the bolshevik crushing of the Kronstadt uprising were less enthusiastic about the film. The Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein was also screened many times, as well as a number of other Soviet films. Documentaries made in Spain during the war were also shown. The Soviet film-makers Roman Karmen and Boris Makadeev made Madrid se defiende (Madrid defends herself), Madrid en llamas (Madrid in Flames) and the full-length Ispaniia.

The republican government subsidized newsreels and propaganda films, such as España Leal en Armas (Loyalist Spain under Arms), on which Luis Buñuel worked, and later when the Republic’s own film studios were set up, they made Madrid, directed by Manuel Villegas López; Viva la Repu

´blica; Los Trece Puntos de la Victoria (The Thirteen Points of Victory) and, most famous of all, André Malraux’s and Max Aub’s L’Espoir, which did not appear until after the war was over. Even the Generalitat set up its own organization, Laya Films, which produced weekly newsreels, España al día, and nearly thirty documentaries.²⁴

In the spring of 1937, when the republicans were at last starting to win the propaganda war, the International Exhibition of Arts took place in Paris. The Republic’s pavilion became famous with the display of Picasso’s Guernica, but also the work of many other great artists, including Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Luis Lacasa, Josep Lluís Sert, Horacio Ferrer and Antoni Bonet. The nationalist government put on its own exhibition, but it had to be under the Vatican flag. Its main work was an altarpiece painted by José María Sert, Intercesión de Santa Teresa por la guerra española.²⁵

The other great event was the International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture, which had sessions in Valencia and Madrid, and finished in Paris. This was entirely a communist front organization, with writers from Spain, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, the United States and South America, as well as exiles from the Axis countries.²⁶ But the communist attempt to create a cultural as well as political hegemony on the left was not helped by events in Moscow.