International Solidarity with the Spanish Republic 1936--1939

A war memorial compiled by the survivors.

This is an anthology of the international volunteer movement for the Spanish Republic, assembled over nine years by the veterans' organisations themselves - the Association of Austrian Volunteers for Republican Spain, the International Brigade Association and Friends of Republican Spain in Britain, the Anti-Fascist Fighters' Committee of Bulgaria, the Fraternity of Former Yugoslav Volunteers, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and sixteen others. The project began at a Berlin meeting of veterans in July 1966 and was cleared by an international editorial board in Moscow in January 1970.

Dolores Ibarruri opens it; Luigi Longo, former Commissar General of the International Brigades and by then chairman of the Italian Communist Party, follows, and Franz Dahlem after him. Then come twenty-one country chapters, from Argentina to Yugoslavia.

The country chapters are the substance, and much of it is institutional history done well: how money was raised, how volunteers were smuggled across frontiers, who was arrested where, what the press printed. The British chapter, by Nan Green - who served in Spain and whose husband was killed there - includes an account of the reception of Basque children after Guernica that has a specificity no polemic could manufacture. The Italian chapter breaks down the political composition of its four thousand volunteers down to the individual, with the largest single group unaffiliated to any party.

The casualties are not softened: of six hundred men of the Thaelmann Battalion before Madrid, thirty-two survived.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.