1909–1987
○ Natural causes
A painstaking archival historian of the Spanish Civil War
He went to Spain to report a war and became the historian who spent a lifetime assembling the record of a defeated revolution.
Burnett Bolloten was a reporter who covered the Spanish Civil War and a historian who traced the power struggle and suppression of revolution within the Republican camp. Initially sympathetic to the Communist Party, he became convinced through his study of the May Days of 1937 and the repression of the POUM that Communist forces had curtailed the Republic’s revolutionary alliance. Over decades he assembled refugee testimony and extensive press and documentary materials, producing The Spanish Revolution and the posthumously published The Spanish Civil War, works that became central to debates over the conflict’s political history.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1909Born in Wales
- 1936–1938United Press correspondent in Spain
- 1940년대–1980년대Collected and researched Civil War materials in Mexico and the United States
- 1961Published The Grand Camouflage
- 1979Published The Spanish Revolution
- 1987Died in California
- 1991The Spanish Civil War published posthumously
Related historical events
Refugee testimony, documentary collecting, and the Grand Camouflage dispute
After his war reporting ended, Bolloten moved to Mexico and spent several years there with his first wife, Gladys Evie Green, interviewing refugees of the conflict and assembling material about the war. That collection later came to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; per its finding aid it includes clippings from the Spanish, French, Italian and British press arranged day by day, microfilm of Spanish and foreign periodical issues, and copies of papers of the Socialist politician Luis Araquistain relating to the war. These materials served as the research base for The Grand Camouflage (1961), The Spanish Revolution (1979) and the posthumous The Spanish Civil War (1991). The Hoover Institution Library & Archives acquired the collection in 1946. In The Grand Camouflage, released in March 1961, Bolloten examined how Communist forces concealed a far-reaching social revolution and rose to power within Spain's anti-Franco camp. The publisher's description of the 1991 volume states that his earlier works, The Grand Camouflage (1961) and The Spanish Revolution (1979), ended with the controversial events of May 1937, and that only The Spanish Civil War covered the entire period from 1936 to 1939. In that last volume he argued that the Communist party eliminated or absorbed its opponents on the left, among them anarchosyndicalists, dissident Marxists, Socialists and liberal Republicans, and, backed by Soviet prestige and resources, gained decisive control over nearly every phase of public life. That is a documented argument of his, and it remains a central axis of debate over the political history of the war.