The catalogue records this book under the name of Dolores Ibarruri, and that is wrong in a way worth pausing over. Ibarruri wrote four pages of it. The volume is an anthology issued by the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement and the Soviet War Veterans' Committee, and its real authors are named plainly in the front matter: 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. After Ibarruri come Luigi Longo, former Commissar General of the International Brigades and by 1975 Chairman of the Italian Communist Party, and Franz Dahlem of the East German party; then twenty-one country chapters, in alphabetical order from Argentina to Yugoslavia; then an afterword by the Soviet editorial board, I. S. Kremer and I. N. Nesterenko.
The provenance matters because it is unusual. "From the Publishers" dates the project to a Berlin meeting of Spanish war veterans in July 1966, records that an International Editorial Board was formed, and states that the Board "discussed and approved for publication the materials presented by a number of national organisations of Spanish war veterans" at a meeting in Moscow from 10 to 19 January 1970. Publication followed five years later. This is not a Progress title written to order by an institute staffer. It is a negotiated document, assembled over nine years by the surviving veterans' bodies of a dozen ruling parties and a dozen Western communist parties, cleared by a committee in Moscow, and issued in English for export in the year Franco died. Every silence in it was agreed by someone.
Take the courage first, because it is not in dispute and this book documents it better than most.
The country chapters are, in large part, ordinary institutional history done competently: how money was raised, how volunteers were smuggled out, who was arrested at which frontier, what the newspapers printed. The Britain chapter, written by Nan Green — who served in Spain and whose husband was killed there — is a model of the type. Its account of the reception of Basque children after the bombing of Guernica has a specificity that no polemic could manufacture: "A miracle of voluntary organisation transformed bare fields outside the port of Southampton into a well-equipped transit camp", from which four thousand children went to homes organised by trades councils, union branches and religious bodies, and were taught in their own language. The Italian chapter gives the political composition of its four thousand volunteers down to the individual: 1,822 Communists, 137 Socialists, 124 anarchists, 55 from radical democratic parties, and the largest single group unaffiliated. Bulgaria's contingent of roughly 460, we are told, included "a few anarchists, Social-Democrats and members of the Agricultural Union". These numbers were collected by people who knew the men.
And the casualties are not softened. The Thaelmann Battalion at the approaches to Madrid held its positions "at a high price—out of 600 men, only 32 survived". Of the eight hundred men of the Franco-Belgian Sixth of February Battalion who reached the Jarama, "only 150 remained in action after ten days of fighting". More than half of the 1,600 Yugoslav volunteers were killed. Whatever else this book is, it is a war memorial compiled by the survivors, and it should be read as one. The men and women in it went to Spain because they understood, earlier and more clearly than their governments, what fascism was going to do to Europe. Nothing said below diminishes that by a gram.
What the book cannot do is tell the truth about why the Republic lost.
Search the whole 143,000 words and the acronym POUM occurs exactly once. It is in the Austrian chapter, in a single sentence: "Serious contradictions appeared after the POUM putsch in Barcelona in May 1937 over the question of the attitude to be adopted to Trotskyism, but this had no effect on the relations between the members of the International Brigades." That is the entire treatment. The Barcelona May Days — five days of street fighting in the Republic's second city, in which several hundred people were killed — are a subordinate clause. They are called a putsch, which they were not; the fighting began when Assault Guards under the Generalitat's commissioner of public order moved on the CNT-held Telefónica exchange on 3 May 1937.
The Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista was outlawed the following month. Its leader Andreu Nin — who had been Trotsky's secretary in Moscow, who had broken with him, and who had served as Justice minister in the Catalan government until December 1936 — was arrested in Barcelona on 16 June 1937, taken to a house at Alcalá de Henares, tortured, and killed. His body was never recovered. This was not a fact that had to wait for the Soviet archives: by May 1945 the American Trotskyist monthly Fourth International (vol. VI no. 5) could refer to Nin in passing, in a routine note on Spanish party history, as having been "subsequently killed by the GPU", and expect its readers to need no explanation. The name Nin does not appear in this book. It does not appear in the seventeen-hundred-line name index either, an index otherwise so complete that it lists flight commanders and battalion cooks. Neither does the CNT — the anarcho-syndicalist confederation which had over a million members and which held Barcelona in July 1936 — appear anywhere by name in these pages, though its rival the UGT does. Camillo Berneri, the Italian anarchist philosopher murdered in Barcelona during those same May days, is absent from a chapter that otherwise names Italian volunteers one by one.
The silence is not accidental, because the book does have a settled view of the Republic's left, and states it. From the Bulgarian chapter: "The attacks on the Spanish Repubic came not only from the right but also from the 'left', from numerically small groups of Bulgarian anarchists, and also Trotskyites who called for a 'proletarian revolution' against the government of the Popular Front." From the German chapter, on the autumn of 1938: "capitulationist feeling mounted among the unstable elements in the Popular Front—the Right-wing Socialists, the bourgeois Republicans, the anarchists, and also among regular officers." From the Soviet chapter, on the International Brigades in Catalonia: "Anarchist extremists tried to present the International Brigades as an armed force seeking to win power for the Communists."
Anarchists appear in these pages in exactly two acceptable postures — as individual brave men who fought and died, and as admirers of the USSR. The book quotes Durruti's letter to the Soviet proletariat, and it quotes García Oliver: "If the fascists ever attack the Soviet Union I will go and defend it. I am an anarchist." What it never records is what the CNT and the POUM actually argued about — land collectivisation, the militias, workers' control of the factories, whether the war could be won by restoring a conventional bourgeois state or only by extending the revolution — or that the Communist Party's answer to that argument in 1937 was, in the end, the political police.
The most revealing document in the volume gives the policy away without meaning to. In the Soviet chapter, the correspondence of December 1936 and January 1937 between Voroshilov, Molotov and Stalin and the Spanish premier Largo Caballero is quoted at length and described as "full of sincerity and trust". The Soviet leaders assure Caballero that their military specialists have been instructed "on no account to lose sight of the fact" that a Soviet adviser "can be of real use only if he keeps strictly within the limits of an adviser and an adviser alone". And then the book summarises the rest of the letter in its own words: "The Soviet leaders went on to recommend the implementation of certain measures in the interests of the peasantry and the petty and middle bourgeoisie, and also measures to protect the property of citizens of states which did not support the insurgents."
There is the strategy, printed without embarrassment. The Soviet Union was pressing the Spanish government to reassure property owners and foreign investors, in the belief that a Republic which looked respectable would be sold arms by London and Paris. It never was. What that policy did accomplish was to put Moscow at the head of the counter-revolution inside the Republic, and to make the destruction of the POUM and the disarming of the CNT a condition of continued Soviet supply. The book records the consequence in a single flat sentence a few paragraphs later — "After the resignation of Largo Caballero's government in May 1937 the new Spanish Prime Minister, the Socialist Juan Negrin..." — with no hint that Caballero fell precisely because he would not proscribe the POUM at the Communist ministers' insistence, or that his fall followed the Barcelona fighting by days.
There is a second silence, and it is the one the veterans would have felt most. The Soviet chapter names the advisers with pride: "The post of chief adviser was held consecutively by Y. K. Berzin (1936–37), G. M. Stern (1937–38) and K. M. Kachanov (1938–39)", the ambassador M. I. Rosenberg, the consul-general in Barcelona V. A. Antonov-Ovseyenko, the military attaché V. Y. Gorev, the air commander Y. V. Smushkevich, the Pravda correspondent Mikhail Koltsov. Of these, Berzin was shot in 1938. Antonov-Ovseyenko — one of the men who took the Winter Palace in 1917 — was shot in 1938. Rosenberg was shot in 1938. Gorev was shot. Koltsov, arrested at the end of 1938, was shot in 1940. Smushkevich and Stern, both decorated Heroes of the Soviet Union, were shot together in October 1941. Vladimir Ćopić, whom the Yugoslav chapter honours by name and shows in a photograph as commander of the 15th International Brigade, was arrested in Moscow and shot in 1939. Not one of these deaths is mentioned. The book that carefully records how Herbert Tschape was captured by the Gestapo and executed cannot say how Jan Berzin died.
The same erasure operates on the parties. The Poland chapter narrates the Communist Party of Poland's Popular Front work through 1936, 1937 and 1938 and never mentions that the Comintern dissolved that party in 1938 and that most of its leadership then in the USSR was shot. Nor does Santiago Carrillo, General Secretary of the Spanish party since 1960, appear anywhere in the book or its index — nor does Enrique Líster, the civil war commander Moscow had backed against him in the split of 1970. That the editorial board approved these materials in January 1970, at the height of that quarrel, and then let the volume sit five years, is worth holding in mind. A contemporaneous account of the Carrillo–Moscow conflict, and of the use of a Spanish war veteran as the Kremlin's instrument against the Spanish leadership, appeared in Inprecor no. 0, which quotes l'Humanité of 23 February 1974.
Yugoslavia is the interesting exception, and shows what the negotiation produced. The Yugoslav chapter, written by the Fraternity of Former Yugoslav Volunteers, is the only one that credits its own party rather than Moscow: the solidarity campaign is "led by the Secretary of the LCY Central Committee, Josip Broz Tito", and the Soviet Union barely features. Twenty-seven years after 1948, the Soviet editors let that stand — the price of having Yugoslavia in the book at all. The chapter has its own small anachronism, calling the party the League of Communists throughout, a name it did not take until 1952. Absent altogether, meanwhile, are Belgium and the Netherlands, whose volunteers fill the French chapter's battalion rosters; Denmark, though Sweden and Norway are here; Mexico, the Republic's most consistent state supporter, whose people Ibarruri thanks by name in her opening piece; and Albania, likewise thanked by Ibarruri but broken with Moscow since 1961. The publishers say only that "the collection could not contain material on all the national contingents that took part in the struggle in Spain."
The reply to this book was written while the events were still happening, by people who were there. The indispensable eyewitness account is George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938), which describes the Barcelona fighting from a POUM militia rooftop and then the manhunt that followed, and which was refused by Gollancz and sold a few hundred copies. The political analysis is Felix Morrow's Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (New York, 1938), written from within the Trotskyist movement and still the sharpest statement of the case that the Republic's defeat followed from its refusal of the revolution rather than from an excess of it.
But books can be dismissed as the settled positions of a defeated faction. The sharper answer to a volume assembled in committee over nine years is the argument as it was actually conducted, month by month, by people who did not know how it would come out. That record exists: the New York monthly Fourth International ran from 1940, and the Spanish question never left it.
Its first substantial statement is Trotsky's, printed in November 1940 (vol. I no. 6) as "The Comintern and the GPU". Set against the 1975 volume's account of Soviet advisers dispatched to help a fraternal republic, one sentence in it does a great deal of work: "In Spain the GPU killed my former secretary, Erwin Wolf, and a number of my political co-thinkers." The piece is dated 19 August 1940; the magazine's editorial note observes that it was finished "a few days before his assassination". He did not live to see it published. The following month's issue (vol. I no. 7, December 1940) carried "The Class, the Party and the Leadership", his last major text on the Spanish defeat, and it is worth reading precisely because it is not a martyrology. Trotsky's judgement on the man Moscow had killed is severe: "The real misfortune was that Nin, covering himself with the authority of Lenin and the October revolution, could not make up his mind to break with the People's Front." He is arguing that the POUM's leaders were destroyed while still trying to stay inside the coalition that destroyed them.
In April 1945 (vol. VI no. 4) the magazine reprinted Trotsky's December 1937 pamphlet "The Lesson of Spain – The Last Warning" — written within months of the killings, and framing them as a pattern rather than an incident: "Why does every approach to our views or our methods of action (Durruti, Andres Nin, Landau, and others) compel the Stalinist gangsters to resort to bloody reprisals?" By July–August 1950 (vol. XI no. 4), Joseph Hansen's survey "Stalin's Frame-Up System" set Spain inside the Terror rather than beside it: "An outstanding victim was Andres Nin, leader of the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). Trotsky's former Secretary, Erwin Wolfe, was kidnapped in Spain by the GPU and never seen again." That is the connection the 1975 book most needs its readers not to make — the one running from the Moscow dock to Alcalá de Henares, and back to the fate of its own named advisers.
The most useful item, though, is the least famous. Across three issues — December 1945 (vol. VI no. 12), January 1946 (vol. VII no. 1) and February 1946 (vol. VII no. 2) — Fourth International translated the theses adopted in May 1945 by the Internationalist Communists, the Spanish section, in exile and a few years out from the events. On Barcelona they describe what the Austrian chapter calls a putsch as "the proletarian insurrection in Barcelona of May 1937", and their target is not only the Communists: it is the CNT ministers who ordered the ceasefire, and the failure they name is one of leadership — "The May Days in which a great number of militants of the CNT and Anarchist Youth rose up against the latest counter-revolutionary acts of the government put in sharp relief the gulf that existed between the most conscious part of the anarchist movement and the anarchist leaders who were participating in the (bourgeois) government." On the POUM they are harsher still, calling it "the most genuine centrist Party in the workers' movement" and writing that it "trampled on the Marxism that it professed and disarmed itself and disarmed the working class in the face of the events which were threatening both the Revolution and its own head". Trotsky's own writings on Spain, gathered in English as The Spanish Revolution (1931–39), had argued the same from 1931 onwards.
The contrast with the volume in hand is not one between two propagandas. Here is a tendency that fought the POUM's politics in public, without pause, for a decade — and that nonetheless recorded who killed Nin, when, and on whose behalf. Twenty-one veterans' organisations and an editorial board in Moscow took nine years to produce one subordinate clause about Barcelona; a scattering of Spanish exiles, meeting in May 1945 with nothing to protect, produced a document that spends pages on their own side's errors. That is the difference between an argument and a settlement.
Read this volume, then, for what it honestly is: the collective memory of the men who went, edited by the institutions that outlived them. The regiments, the frontier routes, the fundraising, the casualty figures — these are testimony, and much of it exists nowhere else in English. The politics are a settlement reached in a Moscow committee room in January 1970 about what those men were to be remembered as having fought for. The book itself supplies the standard by which to judge it. It closes on the hope that readers will "draw from the experience of the past lessons that will be of use". The lesson the Republic's defeat actually teaches is the one lesson these twenty-one chapters were assembled to prevent anyone drawing.