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Abstract
This article offers a critical reassessment of the Soviet role in the Spanish Civil War, based on recent scholarship and declassified official documents. The author interrogates the broad historiographical consensus that reduces Soviet intervention in Spain to a sinister and nefarious force. Stalin's ignominious reputation vis-à-vis the Loyalist side is present in nearly all Western scholarship on the war, whether specialized studies by Nationalist sympathizers or Republicans in exile, or general treatments of European history written in England or America. It would be difficult to locate even a brief overview of the Civil War published outside of Russia that does not in some fashion demonize the Soviet dictator and the Soviet military assistance, code-named ‘Operation X’. The author argues that the basic error in the wide-ranging literature of this topic has always been to approach Stalin's position in Spain as one based on strength rather than weakness. If framed within the context of failure, Stalin's long-standing reputation as the villain of the Civil War may appear in a strikingly different light, and Soviets’ overall contribution to the Loyalist struggle therefore deserving a nuanced revision. The author also explores the multiple strands of the Soviet-Spanish relationship, which included not only military aid but also diplomatic, cultural and humanitarian facets.
Notes
1 Daniel Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética y la Guerra Civil española: una revisión crítica (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2003), 13–17.
2 Yuri Rybalkin, Operatsiia ‘X’: Sovetskaia voennaia pomoshch’ respublikanskoi Ispanii (1936–1939) (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2000), 37. To date, only Rybalkin has cited unpublished material for this discovery, accessed through his military connections at the Presidential Archive (f. 3, op. 74, del. 20, l, p. 51). The reference is cited without attribution in Anthony Beevor's popular history, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolas, 2006), 156 and, with attribution, in Ángel Viñas, La soledad de la República (Barcelona: Crítica, 2006), 86.
3 RGVA (Russian State Military Archive) f. 33987, op. 3, del. 960, l, p. 219. The same document may be consulted in the Archives of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, R-2296/7. All translations are by the author.
4 RGASPI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii) [Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History] (formerly Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii, or RTsKhIDNI), f. 17, op. 120, del. 274, ll, pp. 1–2.
5 On the domestic campaigns, see Academy of Sciences of the USSR, International Solidarity with the Spanish Republic, 1936–1939 (Moscow: Progreso, 1974) and Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética, 73–95.
6 Print journalists who travelled to Spain left memoir accounts of their experiences. In Spanish, see Mikhail Koltsov, Diario de la guerra española, trans. and intro. by José Fernández Sánchez (Madrid: Akal Editor, 1978) and Ilya Ehrenburg, Corresponsal en España (Barcelona: Editorial Prensa Ibérica, 1998). In Russian only, see Ovadii Savich, Dva goda v Ispanii, 1937–1939 (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel, 1981).
7 David Allen, ‘The Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War’, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 1952, 437–38.
8 The filmmakers, too, left memoir accounts, but neither has been translated from the Russian: Roman Karmen, No Pasaran! (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1972), and Boris Makaseev, ‘Iz khroniki geroicheskoi respubliki’, in My internatsionalisty: Vospominaniia sovetskikh dobrovol'tsev-uchastnikov natsional'no-revoliutsionnoi voiny v Ispanii, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Izdat. Politicheskoi Literatury, 1986), 158–64.
9 Politburo Protocol from 17 August 1936, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, del. 980, l, p. 235.
10 For an overview of Russian newsreel production in the Civil War, see Daniel Kowalsky, ‘The Soviet Cinematic Offensive in the Spanish Civil War’, Film History, 19:1 (2007), 7–19 and ‘La ofensiva cinematográfica soviética en la Guerra Civil española’, Archivos de la Filmoteca, 60–61 (2008), 50–77.
11 For negative reactions to the campaign, gathered by the NKVD, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999), 171.
12 ECCI Protocol No. 60, 23 July 1936, RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, del. 1101, l, p. 15.
13 RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, del. 1101, l, p. 32.
14 Manuilskii report to ECCI session of 20 September 1937, RGASPI, f. 495, op. 2, del. 257, ll, pp. 41–61. The cited lines are from l, p. 59, and merit reproduction in the original French: ‘Les événements d'Espagne doivent être utilisés pour élever sans cesse l'enthousiasme des masses […] Nous sommes loin d'utiliser toutes les possibilities’.
15 Soviet diplomatic appointments are discussed in Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética, 25–41.
16 Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética, 36–41.
17 The establishment of Pascua's embassy is covered in Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética, 42–67. I used unpublished Politburo protocols housed in the former Party Archive together with the ambassador's personal papers at the Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid). The decree granting Pascua the detached residence at number 18, Malaia Nikitskaia, appears in Politburo Protocol 128, 23 October 1936, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 982.
18 Pascua's personal notes of meeting with Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov, 3 February 1937, Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid) (AHN), Diversos, Marcelino Pascua, Leg. 2, Exp. 6.
19 See Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética, 42–67.
20 Now over a half-century old, but not beyond its use-by date, the only account of the much-maligned Non-Intervention Committee remains David T. Cattell, Soviet Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1957).
21 On the cultural exchanges between the two countries, see Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética, 133–90.
22 Sofiia Antonov-Ovseenko to VOKS, 31 Ocober 1936, GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 5283, op. 7, del. 840, l, p. 180.
23 See Tim Rees, ‘The Highpoint of Comintern Influence? The Communist Party and the Civil War in Spain’, in International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–1943, ed. Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1998), 143–67 (p. 150).
24 A. A. Grechko, Istoriia vtoroi mirovoi voiny, 2 vols (Moscow: Voennoe izdat. Ministerstva Oborony SSSR, 1974), II, 54, 137.
25 The military intervention is best covered in Rybalkin, Operatsiia ‘X’.
26 The gold has been revisited many times by Ángel Viñas in El oro de Moscú (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1979), in El oro español en la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1976), and in ‘The Financing of the Spanish Civil War’, in Revolution and War in Spain, 1931–1939, ed. Paul Preston (London: Methuen, 1984), 266–83; and most recently, and definitively, in Vi ñas, La soledad de la República, 373–98.
27 There is no specialized scholarship in any language on Soviet air power in the war. The most up-to-date account of Soviet armour in Spain is Steven J. Zaloga, Spanish Civil War Tanks: The Proving Ground for Blitzkrieg (Oxford: Osprey, 2010).
28 Kuznetsov's memoirs have rarely been incorporated into the non-Russian literature on the war, yet they have wide-ranging value, not least in clarifying the logistical problems faced by the Soviet navy in transporting hardware to Spain. See N. G. Kuznetsov, Nakanune (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1969), Na dalekom meridiane, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1988) and, in English, Memoirs of Wartime Minister of the Navy (Moscow: Progreso, 1990).
29 Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Murray, 1998), 138–40.
30 ECCI Protocol Nr. 64, 3 August 1936, RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, del. 1105, l, p. 1.
31 The campaigns are discussed in detail in Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética, 73–95.
32 ECCI Protocol Nr. 74, 18 September 1936, RGASPI, f. 495, op. 18, del. 1135, l, p. 6.
33 Codavilla report to ECCI, 22 September 1936, RGASPI, f. 495, op. 2, del. 233, ll, pp. 56–99.
34 The best introduction to the formation of the International Brigades (IB) is the work of Rémi Skoutelsky, including: Novedad en el frente: las Brigadas Internacionales en la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 2006); ‘The Comintern and the International Brigades’, The Volunteer, 24:1 (2002), 9–13; and L'Espoir guidait leur pas: les volontaires français dans les Brigades internationales, 1936–1939 (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1998).
35 For Luigi Longo's version of the IB organization, see Las Brigadas internacionales en España (México D.F.: Ediciones Era, 1966).
36 William Rust, Britons in Spain (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 5–6.
37 In September 1937, the CPUSA organ Daily Worker acknowledged that it had actively recruited cadres. See R. Dan Richardson, Comintern Army: The International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1982), 32.
38 Komunisticheskii Internatsional: Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969), 460.
39 See Skoutelsky, L'Espoir guidait leur pas, 29–54.
40 For the arrival of the IB, see Hugh G. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster), 456. On the establishment of the Albacete base, see Skoutelsky, L'Espoir guidait leur pas, 29–79 and Novedad en el frente, 76–84.
41 This is the relatively conservative though by no means final estimate of Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 982–83. Declassified Soviet documents indicate as many as 50,000. See RGASPI, f. 495, op. 76, del. 33, l, p. 18, cited in M.V. Novikov, SSSR, Komintern i grazhdanskaia voia v Ispanii 1936–1939, 2 vols (Iaroslav: Iaroslavskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet, 1995), II, 100.
42 Moscow's role in shaping and overseeing the IB is the subject in part of Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, ed. Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2001); see especially 233–60 and 431–73.
43 The first study of the topic was Enrique Zafra, Los niños españoles evacuados a la URSS (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1989), though this did not incorporate materials from the Russian archives. Kowalsky's chapter in La Unión Soviética (96–120), which quoted unpublished Soviet-era documents, has now been complemented by a number of recent accounts, including Susana Castillo, Mis años en la escuela soviética (Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, 2009) and Inmaculada Colomina Limonero, Dos patrias, tres mil destinos: vida y exilio de los niños de la Guerra de España refugiados en la Unión Soviética (Madrid: Cinca, 2010).
44 On the condition of Soviet children in the decade of the thirties, see Stalinism As a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, ed. Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2000), 356–420.
45 The late dispatch of some $55 million worth of Soviet arms, transferred on seven ships, was for many years considered a myth, yet today declassified documents from the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) confirm that this did indeed take place. The logistics of the operation, and contents of the delivery, down to the precise number of shells (1,382,540), are revealed in manifests in RGVA f. 33987, op. 3, del. 1259, ll, pp. 85–105.
46 Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), 990–93.
47 See Kowalsky, La Unión Soviética, 253–58.
48 Ángel Viñas, ‘September 1936: Stalin's Decision to Support the Spanish Republic’, in Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, ed. Jim Jump (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 146–49.
49 See footnote 26.
50 For a comprehensive examination of the fate of Soviet personnel who served in Spain, see Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War, 319.
51 The fate of the brigaders and Loyalist exiles, many of whom ended up in Nazi concentration camps, is treated by various scholars, including David Wingeate Pike, In the Service of Stalin: The Spanish Communists in Exile, 1939–45 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1993), and in Remi Skoutelsky's three important books: L'Espoir guidait leur pas, Novedad en el Frente, and, with Michel Lefebvre, Les Brigades Internationales: images retrouvés (Paris: Seuil, 2003).
52 RGASPI, f. 495, op. 76, d. 22, ll, pp. 36–39.
53 Scholarship on the Blue Division is now a sizeable subfield of the Second World War. The most comprehensive recent account is Wayne H. Bowen, Spain during World War II (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2006).