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ABSTRACT
While foreign fighters are jihadis in the contemporary public imagination, over the last 100 years many more individuals volunteered to be foreign fighters for Marx than for Mohammed. During the 75 years between the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, approximately one quarter-million volunteers joined Marxist armed groups in civil wars in foreign countries. The shift in leadership from the Soviet Union and the European-based Comintern to China and its diaspora networks in Asia to Cuban direction of missions across Latin America and Africa produced increasingly strategic and long-lived deployments of non-combatant nation-building volunteers along with fighters. Some of these entities remain active, and the movement continues to inspire Marxist foreign fighters in conflicts such as Syria even without state sponsorship. This article examines the life cycle of this transnational movement, and how it evolved as different state actors directed it to match their interests and strategic goals. It also examines understudied instances of foreign fighters in the Global South and the impact of their leadership.
Acknowledgements
Thank you Whitney Grespin and Munira Mustaffa for your assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Malet, Foreign Fighters; de Guttry, Capone, and Paulussen, Foreign Fighters under International Law and Beyond; Arielli, From Byron to Bin Laden.
2. Hegghammer, “Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters”; Byman, Road Warriors.
3. Malet, Foreign Fighters, 98, 221.
4. Acharya, “How Ideas Spread.”
5. Malet, Foreign Fighters, 111.
6. Reynolds and Hafez, “Social Network Analysis.”
7. Dawson and Amarasingam, “Talking to Foreign Fighters.”
8. Moore and Tumelty, “Foreign Fighters and the Case of Chechnya.”
9. Moore and Tumelty, “Foreign Fighters and the Case of Chechnya,” 58–126.
10. Russian Historical Library, Internationalists in the Red Army, http://rushist.com/index.php/russia/4737-internatsionalisty-v-krasnoj-armii#rr3
11. Ibid.
12. Smele, Historical Dictionary, 506.
13. Konev, “Foreign Internationalists in the Red Guard,” 7.
14. Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 41.
15. Brinkley, The Volunteer Army, 50–2; Daly and Trofimov, Russia in War, xxix.
16. Konev, “Foreign Internationalists in the Red Guard,” 7.
17. Pereira, White Siberia, 63.
18. Russian Historical Library, Internationalists in the Red Army.
19. Konev, “Foreign Internationalists in the Red Guard,” 7.
20. The Russian Historical Library provides the lowest available estimate, while Smele (p. 506) asserts that 5% of the 5 million foreign citizens in Russia became foreign fighters.
21. Leon Trotsky, How the Revolution Armed, Volume 1 (1923), p. 276 as cited by Pereira, White Siberia, 192.
22. Konev, “Foreign Internationalists in the Red Guard,” 7.
23. Russian Historical Library, Internationalists in the Red Army.
24. Konev, “Foreign Internationalists in the Red Guard,” 7.
25. Daly and Trofimov, Russia in War and Revolution, 1914–1922, 249.
26. Russian Historical Library, Internationalists in the Red Army.
27. New York Times “Bolshevist Power Waning,” 12 July 1918.
28. Dotsenko, The Struggle for a Democracy in Siberia, 17.
29. Whitewood, “Nationalities in a Class War,” 349–52.
30. Konev, “Foreign Internationalists in the Red Guard,” 7.
31. Russian Historical Library, Internationalists in the Red Army.
32. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 10.
33. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 9
34. Malet, Foreign Fighters, 92–126.
35. Johnston, Legions of Babel, 25; Howard and Reynolds, Mackenzie-Papineau, 15–16.
36. Johnston, Legions of Babel, 26; Brome, The International Brigades, 16; Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 438–9, 447.
37. Mangilli-Climpson, Italian Antifascists, 38.
38. Richardson, Comintern Army, 8–9, 23, 25–35.
39. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 455
40. Ward and MacLeod, Spain’s Democracy, 14.
41. Barbara Dale May, “The Endurance of Dreams Deferred: Rafael Alberti and Langston Hughes,” in Romeiser, Red Flags, Black Flags, 24.
42. Peter Carroll, “Before Pearl Harbor,” in Carroll, Nash and Small, The Good Fight Continues, 24.
43. Edwards, Airmen, 21.
44. Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left, 68–9.
45. Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left, 122.
46. Carroll, “Before Pearl Harbor,” 27
47. Carroll, The Odyssey, 12.
48. Edwards, Airmen, 22.
49. Carroll, The Odyssey, 43.
50. Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left, 333–6.
51. Johnston, Legions of Babel, 151–2.
52. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve, 8.
53. Williamson, “Foreign Volunteers in the Chinese Civil War.”
54. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve, 36
55. Hooper, Foreigners Under Mao, 2, 13.
56. Hooper, Foreigners Under Mao, 13–14; Brady, Making the Foreign Serve, 44.
57. Jones, “The Chinese Volunteers,” 7.
58. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve, 54.
59. Hooper, Foreigners Under Mao, 11, 15–16, 18, 20.
60. Hooper, Foreigners Under Mao, 12, 20.
61. Hooper, Foreigners Under Mao, 11–12.
62. Hooper, Foreigners Under Mao, 19, 20, 248.
63. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve, 3, 35, 57.
64. Hooper, Foreigners Under Mao, 5.
65. Brady, Making the Foreign Serve, 35.
66. Hooper, Foreigners Under Mao, 20.
67. O’Ballance, Malaya, 2, 100.
68. Boon Kheng, “Communist Insurgency in Malaysia,” 149.
69. Ling, ”Kebangkitan Parti Komunis Malay,” 27; Ling, “Communist Movement,” 83.
70. Chin, Alias Chin Peng, 450, 457–60.
71. 63 Macaulay, “I Fought for Fidel.” Also, hundreds of anti-imperialist volunteers from nearly 20 countries had traveled to Cuba during the latter half of the nineteenth century to overthrow Spanish dominion, culminating in the Cuban War of Independence in the 1890s. Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moises Sio Wong, “The People of Cuba Were Behind Our Effort,” 81.
72. Al Jazeera, “Che Guevara and Fidel Castro: Revolutionary Friends.”
73. Choy, Chui, and Wong, “The People of Cuba,” 82.
74. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Operation Carlotta 1977,” 126.
75. Waters, Cuba and Angola, 9, 12, 15
76. Waters, Cuba and Angola, 210; Michael Radu, “Angola,” in Radu, The New Insurgencies, 138 provides the estimate of killed, missing and wounded Communist intervention forces.
77. Luis Alfonso Zayas, “Our Volunteers Learned what Cuba used to be Like,” 98–100.
78. Waters, Cuba and Angola, 15.
79. Fidel Castro, “African Blood Flows through Our Veins,” 31.
80. Marquez, “Operation Carlotta 1977,” 132.
81. Schwampe, Muslim Foreign Fighters in Armed Conflicts, 35.
82. David Lewis, Analysis of British and US Volunteers, 5,8.
83. Bonner, “Behind Nicaraguan Build-up,” New York Times.
84. Siegel, “The KGB in the Third World.”
85. David Lewis, Analysis of British and US Volunteers, 23–4.
86. David Lewis, Analysis of British and US Volunteers, 5, 11, 18.
87. Bessie and Prago, Our Fight, 15, 355.
88. Preston, “Foreign Volunteers,” Washington Post.
89. David Lewis, Analysis of British and US Volunteers, 12–16.
90. Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group, “About Us.”
91. The New York Times, 16 February 1984.
92. Ibid.
93. Preston, “Foreign Volunteers.”
94. David Lewis, Analysis of British and US Volunteers, 25, 79; Boudreaux, “Linder’s Death,” The Los Angeles Times.
95. David Lewis, Analysis of British and US Volunteers, 11, 23, 27, 29.
96. Steven Lewis, “Brigadistas and Volunteers.”
97. Hockenos, Homeland Calling, 238, 239, 255.
98. Reuters, “Libyan Freedom Fighters.”
99. Fritz and Young, “Transnational Volunteers.”
100. Davidson, “Matthew Gardiner,” The Guardian. Ahmet Yusuf Özdemir notes that Turkish and Kurdish volunteers traveled to work with Palestinian militant groups between 1968–1985 in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon (@aysfzdmr on Twitter, 11 December, 2019).
101. Koch, The Non-Jihadi Foreign Fighters, 12–13.
102. Syandan, “Freedom Battalion Established in Rojava.” There is a debate in the literature on foreign fighters over whether rebel groups actually benefit from their numbers and, in some cases, specialized skills, or whether the external actors with perhaps different agendas and at least partly separate command structures introduce significant discord among the rebels. There is evidence that both can occur in the same instances. Among the Communist foreign fighters, recruits fulfilled political propaganda purposes which may have outweighed their combat value. Likewise it is not clear what role veteran foreign fighters typically play when they join new groups, but among Communists there were individuals who fought in Spain who became senior officers and specialists in other groups. These included not only other Communist insurgencies, as with Mao’s ‘Spanish doctors’ as described in this article, but also for other causes including the Israeli War of Independence and the Afghanistan War. Malet, Foreign Fighters, 52–3, 134, 171.
103. Schwampe, Muslim Foreign Fighters, 19, 34.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David Malet
David Malet (Ph.D. George Washington University) is an assistant professor of Justice, Law and Criminology at the American University School of Public Affairs. His research focuses on how transnational actors impact international security, and his book Foreign Fighters examines how rebel groups for different causes have recruited volunteers.