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

Less than a month after the start of the Spanish Civil War the first of the great show trials started. Anyone who criticized them was accused of being a crypto-fascist. Victor Serge, speaking against them in Paris, was heckled by a communist worker: ‘Traitor! Fascist! Nothing you can do will stop the Soviet Union from remaining the fatherland of the oppressed!’²⁷ Apart from rare exceptions, like the poet André Breton, socialists dared not speak out because ‘the interests of the Popular Front demanded the humouring of the communists’. André Gide prepared a statement on the Soviet dictatorship, but when Ilya Ehrenburg heard of it he organized communist militiamen on the Madrid front to send telegrams begging him not to publish a ‘mortal blow’ against them. Gide was appalled: ‘What a flood of abuse I’m going to face! And there will be militiamen in Spain who believe that I am actually a traitor!’ In Spain the POUM’s La Batalla published critical accounts of the trials, thus greatly increasing the enmity the communists felt for their Marxist rivals. Even CNT leaders tried to prevent their press from attacking Stalin’s liquidations at a time when Soviet arms were so desperately needed. The blind, short-term reaction of Western governments and their weakness in the face of Hitler and Mussolini gave the Comintern an apparent monopoly of resistance to fascism.

All this time, the Republic suffered from its dependence on Soviet supplies, which confirmed the fears and prejudices of the minority to whom nationalist propaganda was addressed. In December 1938 Churchill finally came round to the view that ‘the British Empire would run far less risk from the victory of the Spanish government than from that of General Franco’. And he said of Neville Chamberlain that ‘nothing has strengthened the Prime Minister’s hold upon well-to-do society more remarkably than the belief that he is friendly to General Franco and the nationalist cause in Spain’.²⁸ This section of the population cannot have made up much more than 20 per cent of the total, yet it would appear that it had far more influence over British, and therefore Western, policy towards Spain than the large majority who supported the Republic. On this basis the communists’ role on behalf of the Republic probably helped the nationalists become the effective winners of the propaganda war. Appeasement and the Western boycott of the Republic had greatly strengthened the power of the Comintern, which was able to present itself as the only effective force to combat fascism.

Another important lesson from the time was that mass self-deception is simply a sedative prescribed by leaders who cannot face reality themselves. And as the Spanish Civil War proved, the first casualty of war is not truth, but its source: the conscience and integrity of the individual.

14 October 1936. Dolores Ibárruri, ‘La Pasionaria’, who coined the slogan ‘No pasarán!’, making a speech.

The captain of a Soviet ship (left) is welcomed by Companys (centre) and Antonov-Ovseenko (right).

Mikhail Koltsov (right) and the Soviet documentary film-maker Roman Karmen (left) in the trenches before Madrid.

The fighting in the Casa de Campo, November 1936.

Refugees sheltering in the Madrid metro during an air-raid.

International Brigade troops march through Madrid.

Propaganda photo of a Soviet pilot with his ‘Chato’.

Women in Málaga terrified by a nationalist air raid.

The war in the north. Carlist requetés being blessed before going into battle.

Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen (centre right looking at camera) with nationalist and Condor Legion officers.

El Campesino making a speech.

Juan García Oliver broadcasts an appeal for calm during the May events in Catalonia.

6 May 1937. Assault guards brought in to restore order marching through Barcelona.

General Pozas and communist officers take over the Catalan council of defence, May 1937.

The Battle of Brunete, July 1937. Juan Modesto, the communist commander of V Corps.

Republican wounded at Brunete with T-26 tanks in the background.

The failure of four attempts on Madrid in five months did not only strain Franco’s relations with his German and Italian allies. It also provoked rumblings of discontent within the nationalist coalition. The Carlists had not forgotten Franco’s strong reaction to their attempt to maintain the independence of their requeté formations. Meanwhile, Falangist ‘old shirts’ shared their dead leader’s fears that the army would annex them, even though they had grown from 30,000 to several hundred thousand members in a year.