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Abstract
The purpose of this essay is twofold. Without claiming to be exhaustive, it seeks to identify the debates and trends in Spanish Civil War historiography in the United States and Great Britain which developed during key phases of the Cold War between 1947 and 1959. Second, it considers the extent to which the ideological preoccupations of the Cold War were transmitted to Civil War studies and thereby contributed to the ongoing politicization of the subject. Implicit in this analysis is the argument that most contemporary academics make the mistake of reading anti-communist perspectives found in writings on the Spanish Civil War as products of a monolithic Cold War mentality. To achieve a more nuanced understanding of the political dimension of the Civil War, this essay will focus on representative examples of Anglo-American writings critical of the communists which fall into distinct genres.
Notes
1 See, Sebastiaan Faber, Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War: Hispanophilia, Commitment and Discipline (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 66. Representative of the latest research into the cultural dimension of the Cold War are: David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2003); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); and The Cultural Cold War in Europe, 1945–1960, ed. Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (London: Cass, 2003).
2 A possible fourth narrative relating to the regionalist aspirations of the Catalans and Basques has never been fully articulated. However, events surrounding the bombing of Guernica have produced an enormous literature on its own. Collectively these studies can be construed as a Basque-centred narrative of the Civil War.
3 The legacy of the International Brigades in East Germany, which is representative of their fate in other bloc countries, has been studied by Josie McLellan, Anti-Fascism and Memory in East Germany: Remembering the International Brigades 1945–1989 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2004).
4 Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth. An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1943). Various editions of Brenan's work have appeared since its first publication and it has been in print continuously since then.
5 Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939 (London: Freedom Press, 1953), 8 (see especially, pp. 1–8).
6 Walter G. Krivitsky, In Stalin's Secret Service (New York: Harper Brothers, 1939); Louis Fischer, Men and Politics (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941); Jan Valtin, Out of the Night (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, 1941); Alexander Barmine, One Who Survived. The Life Story of a Russian under the Soviets (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1945).
7 A thoroughgoing discussion of the significance of Krivitsky's revelations about communist activities in Spain can be found in the article by Jean Monds (aka Jon Amsden), ‘Krivitsky and Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 9:1 (Spring-Summer, 1978), 7–36.
8 The communist journal New Masses accused him of deception, claiming his real name was Shmelka Ginsberg.
9 On the liberal reaction to Krivitsky, see Frank A. Warren, Liberals and Communism: The ‘Red Decade’ Revisited (London: Bloomington, 1966) and Judy Kutulas, The Long War: The Intellectual People's Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1995). The ways in which US officials linked Krivitsky's testimony to so-called ‘Fifth Column’ activities in the US is discussed in Francis McDonald, Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995).
10 In fact, the anarchists and POUM sympathizers were the only ones at the time who found Krivitsky's testimony wholly credible.
11 This would taint Krivitsky's reputation for the next sixty years. It was only after formerly classified papers in the US and Great Britain were released in the 1990s that the accuracy of Krivitsky's statements could be verified. The most comprehensive and balanced assessment of Krivitsky's significance as a spy defector can be found in Gary Kern, A Death in Washington: Walter G. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror (New York: Enigma Books, 2004). See also the following: Chapman Pincher, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage against America and Great Britain (London: Random House, 2009), 68–75; and Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (London: John Murray Publishers, 1998), especially pp. 208–17, which questions the accuracy of Krivitsky's testimony regarding the arms deals between the USSR and Republican Spain.
12 Alexander Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes (New York: Random House, 1953).
13 New York Times, 15 November 1939, p. 21.
14 David T. Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1955), and his Soviet Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957).
15 This was true despite the fact that one pro-Popular Front liberal criticized him for emphasizing the extent to which the communists had infiltrated republican military and political affairs. See, Gabriel Jackson's review of Cattell's Communism and the Spanish Civil War, The American Historical Review, 61:2 (1956), 400–01.
16 The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has pointed out in reference to the Soviet context that denunciation is a highly ambiguous practice which is most commonly construed as an act of betrayal motivated by venality and malice; see Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately (Chicago: Chicago U. P., 1997).
17 Though the full extent of these relentless hunts for ‘enemies of the people’ was not widely known in the West, rumours of the repressions as well as news of the high profile cases inside the USSR were reaching Western audiences.
18 One version of Krivitsky's death is provided in Hugo Dewar, Assassins at Large: Being a Fully Documented and Hitherto Unpublished Account of the Executions outside Russia Ordered by the GPU (London/New York: Wingate, 1951). Dewar was a Trotskyist who attempted to document the crimes committed during the high tide of Stalinist repression.
19 ‘Stalin's Hand in Spain’ is one of several Krivitsky articles, written in collaboration with the journalist and author Levine, and published in the popular US journal The Saturday Evening Post several months before the outbreak of the Second World War.
20 Paul Preston casts suspicion on the credibility of Orlov's revelations by asserting that he sold his memoirs for ‘a small fortune’: see his We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (London: Constable, 2008), 304. While it is true that Orlov received $40,000 for his contributions to Life magazine, his success came only after several other attempts to sell his manuscript had fallen through. Life's chief competitor, The Saturday Evening Post—which had published Krivitsky's writings—rejected Orlov's book on the grounds that it contained material relating to events which were no longer politically relevant: see Edward P. Gazur, Alexander Orlov: The FBI's KGB General (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002), 314. On Orlov's political career, see also Alexander Orlov, The March of Time: Reminiscences, foreword by Edward P. Gazur, intro. and epilogue by Phillip Knightley (London: St Ermin's Press, 2004), and Boris Volodarsky, The Orlov KGB File: The Most Successful Espionage Deception of All Time (New York: Enigma Books, 2009).
21 This was not the case in other areas of scholarship. According to Elizabeth Poretsky, the wife of Walter Krivitsky's friend Ignace Reiss, the Russian historian Boris Nicolaevsky took a scholarly interest in Krivitsky's testimony (Elizabeth K. Poretsky, Our Own People: A Memoir of ‘Ignace Reiss’ and his Friends [Michigan: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1970], 258).
22 For a sympathetic portrait of Fischer's role in Spain, see Preston, We Saw Spain Die, 249–307. Also, see, Louis Fischer, Men in Politics (London: Cape, 1941) and ‘Louis Fischer’, in The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism, ed. R. H. S. Crossman (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), 199–230.
23 Following events like Khrushchev's famous denunciation of Stalin's excesses, and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, several veterans decided that the time had come to renounce their belief in communism.
24 For a discussion of the historiography of the International Brigades, see George Esenwein, ‘Freedom Fighters or Comintern Soldiers? Writing about the “Good Fight” during the Spanish Civil War’, Civil Wars, 12:1–2 (2010), 138–48.
25 Douglas Hyde, I Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist (London: William Heinemann, 1950); Fred Copeman, Reason in Revolt (London: Blandford Press, 1948).
26 See Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1997), 189–201.
27 Bertram Wolfe, ‘What Orwell Saw in Spain before He Wrote 1984’, New York Herald Tribune, 18 May 1952.
28 Lionel Trilling, ‘Introduction’, in George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, intro. by Lionel Trilling (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), i–xix (p. v).
29 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Evanston: Harper and Brothers, 1961); Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1965).
30 Burnett Bolloten, The Grand Camouflage: The Communist Conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961).
31 See, for example, a hostile assessment of Bolloten's contributions to Civil War literature: Herbert Rutledge Southworth, Le Mythe de la croisade de Franco (Paris: Ruedo Ibérico, 1964).