The Spanish Civil War

War first, or revolution first

What stopped the rising of July 1936 was not the army loyal to the government but trade unionists who had got hold of weapons, and that fact produced every quarrel of the next three years. Where the rising was defeated the state effectively dissolved. In Catalonia the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias set up by the CNT and the FAI was the real government, the factories, trams and telephone company of Barcelona passed under union management, and in Aragon the peasants collectivized the land.

Here the two lines parted. The Spanish Communist Party and the Soviet advisers held that the war could only be won by turning the militias into a regular army and rebuilding the machinery of state that had collapsed. Collectivized factories had to be directed centrally for war production, and if British and French help was to be hoped for, the revolution must not be put in front. The CNT and the POUM answered that the moment the revolution stopped, workers would no longer know what they were fighting for, and the war would be lost with it.

How each line explained itself can be read in the documents of the time. In his Valencia lecture of February 1937, What is to be done to win the war?, the Spanish Communist Party's general secretary Jose Diaz argued against making enemies of the peasants and small traders and for a regular army under unified command, and set the order plainly: win the war today, and the people decide tomorrow. In December of the same year, in The Lesson of Spain: The Last Warning, Trotsky answered that this order was the order of defeat.

Neither side was simply wrong. The militias were brave but could not hold a front or organize a large offensive; conversely, the stronger the Popular Army grew, the more of what people believed they had won in the summer of 1936 disappeared. In May 1937 in Barcelona the argument finally became street fighting.

What arrived before the weapons

The first thing the Soviet Union sent to Spain was not arms but cameras. Koltsov of Pravda arrived on 8 August and Ehrenburg of Izvestia soon after, while the cameramen Roman Karmen and Boris Makaseev, whose despatch the Central Committee voted on 17 August, crossed the border on the 23rd and began filming on the spot. The first footage was screened in Moscow on 4 September, exactly a month before the first weapons reached Cartagena. The newsreel series Events in Spain ran to twenty episodes.

On 16 October 1936, as the arms began to arrive, Stalin and the Spanish Communist Party exchanged telegrams on the same day. Stalin called the liberation of Spain not a private affair of the Spaniards but the common cause of all advanced and progressive humanity, and Diaz answered that the solidarity of the Soviet people gave his fighters new strength. What language the intervention wore in public survives in those two sheets.

Inside the USSR a collection drive opened on 3 August. A hundred and twenty thousand people gathered in Red Square, 274 million rubles were raised over the course of the war, and five relief ships carrying flour, sugar and tinned food sailed in the autumn alone. For a long time this was described as a spontaneous initiative of the workers, but the Politburo protocol of 20 September 1936, since made public, laid down in twelve points which factories would hold meetings and when, that a quarter of a day's pay would be collected, and what would run on which newspaper's front page.

Traffic ran the other way too. In the Republican zone Soviet films such as Chapaev and We of Kronstadt were shown and became the most watched films of the war, and after the bombing of Guernica some three thousand Spanish children went to the Soviet Union. The USSR opened twenty-two children's homes for them, staffed at roughly one adult for every two children, better than what Soviet children received at the time. The teaching, though, was Soviet education conducted in Spanish, and when the Republic fell in 1939 these children had nowhere to return to.

Operation X and the bill for it

On 14 September Uritsky of military intelligence and Slutsky of the NKVD put the plan of operations before Voroshilov, the People's Commissar for Defence; on the 26th Voroshilov telephoned Stalin at Sochi and got his approval; and on the 29th the Central Committee voted it through. What matters is that this was not a gift. Every shipment answered a formal request from the Spanish government and every item was priced, and Stalin went through the lists himself striking things out with a red pencil.

The quantities were not small. Sixty-six shipments brought in 648 aircraft, 347 tanks, 1,186 guns and about half a million rifles, some 600,000 tonnes in all. The quality was good at first. The T-26 was the most powerful tank in the world in 1936 and the Nationalists put a bounty on captured ones; the I-15 and I-16 fighters held the sky until Germany sent the Messerschmitt. The trouble was the rifles and artillery: ten types from eight countries in six calibres, a quarter of them made in the 1880s, which made resupplying ammunition a nightmare in itself.

The deliveries were also front-loaded. Of the 648 aircraft, 496 arrived in the first ten months, as did 322 of the 347 tanks, and from April 1937 the flow visibly thinned. The bill was paid by shipping 510 tonnes of the Bank of Spain's gold reserve to Odessa, three quarters of the Spanish reserve and worth 518 million dollars at the time. Moscow manipulated the ruble exchange rate in its own favour and overcharged by at least 51 million dollars, more than a quarter on average. But when the gold ran out in 1938 it extended fresh credits of 70 and 85 million dollars, some 120 million of which it never recovered, so recent scholarship finds it hard to argue that the Soviet Union turned a profit on the whole business.

The Soviet personnel in Spain

At the time it was said there were thirty or eighty thousand Soviet troops in Spain. The figures from the opened archives are nothing like that. Some 2,100 Soviet servicemen were sent over the whole war, and because tours rarely ran past six months, between 600 and 800 were in the country at any one time. The German and Italian forces on Franco's side in the same period numbered more than eighty thousand.

What this small contingent had to carry was large. Pilots were the most numerous at 770 and tank crews came to 351, and it was they who held the sky over Madrid in November 1936 and broke the Italian corps at Guadalajara in March 1937. But there were only 204 interpreters. The naval adviser Kuznetsov directed the Republican fleet by gesture, the tank school taught by hand signals, and the attaché Gorev wrote that without Spanish there could not even be any thought of starting work. The losses were real too: 125 dead and 43 missing, with the tank crews' loss rate the highest at 15 per cent.

Coming home was more dangerous still. Overlapping with the Great Terror, those who had served in Spain were classed as men who had been in contact with foreigners, and the chief military advisers Berzin and Shtern, both ambassadors, the consul-general Antonov-Ovseenko and the correspondent Koltsov were shot. But not everyone died, as the story usually has it. Pavlov, Kuznetsov, Voronov, Malinovsky, Meretskov and Rodimtsev were among the equally many who rose on the strength of their Spanish experience to command in the war against Germany.

The empty embassies

The USSR and Spain had not exchanged so much as a consul since 1917, so the exchange of ambassadors in 1936 was a first for both. Rosenberg, appointed by the Politburo on 21 August, reached Madrid on the 27th, and President Azaña called the presentation of his credentials one of the greatest events of his term. Marcelino Pascua, sent by the Republic, was received in Moscow on 7 October with a national radio broadcast and a Kremlin luncheon; no foreigner was given anything like it in the 1930s.

Within six months it had all been reversed. At the Kremlin on 2 February 1937 Stalin told Pascua he would replace both men with someone less conspicuous, and at the same meeting turned down the friendship treaty Azaña had proposed, advising that Spain would have to keep some distance from the USSR if it wanted British help. It was less a reprimand for meddling than a calculation aimed at London and Paris. When the successor ambassador Gaikis was recalled after three months and purged, Moscow appointed no further ambassador for the rest of the war, and the Republic named no successor after Pascua moved to Paris in March 1938. For three years, while arms and gold moved between them, both embassies stood effectively empty.

The argument that remains

Franco signed the surrender on 1 April 1939 and opened a dictatorship that would last thirty-six years. Close to half a million Republicans crossed the Pyrenees, and many of them spent years behind barbed wire in the French beach camps. Those who remained in Spain entered a daily regime of purge and surveillance. This much the war settled.

What it did not settle is why the Republic lost, and whether it had to. The historiographical battle lines were drawn during the Cold War, but they entered a new phase after the Soviet archives opened in 1991 and again in the 2000s when Spain's movement for the recovery of historical memory brought the war back into the public square.

The largest divide concerns the character of the war itself. On one side stand Helen Graham, Paul Preston and Ángel Viñas, who read the Spanish Civil War as the first battlefield of European democracy against fascism. For them the Republic was a legitimate democratic government, and the decisive cause of its defeat was the Western abandonment: had Britain and France not imposed non-intervention while Germany and Italy armed the rebels, the outcome would have been different.

On the other side, revisionists such as Stanley G. Payne and Pío Moa start from the opposite premise. They argue that the Republic had already been captured by the revolutionary left before July 1936 and no longer functioned as a democracy, and they see the war as fundamentally a clash between revolution and counter-revolution. In this reading Franco's victory was not only inevitable but also saved Spain from becoming a Soviet satellite. Critics answer that this line is little more than the Franco regime's own narrative dressed in academic language, and it now serves as the semi-official history of the Spanish right.

The opening of the Soviet archives from the 1990s onward forced revisions on both sides. Daniel Kowalsky's research showed that Operation X was far smaller than the German and Italian intervention, and that it was an enormously ambitious but operational failure. Neither the Cold War story that the Soviets betrayed the Republic nor the counter-story that they saved it holds up without serious qualification. At the same time, the documents collected in Ronald Radosh's Spain Betrayed demonstrated that the Comintern controlled the Spanish Communist Party and key Republican decisions from the start, a finding that historians such as Graham and Preston have had to take more seriously than before.

Inside Spain the debate has left the academy and sits at the centre of politics. The 2007 Law of Historical Memory mandated the exhumation of Franco-era mass graves and the annulment of show-trial verdicts, but the right asks whether it is necessary to reopen old wounds. Viñas argues that the Spanish right still refuses to face the truth about the Civil War, and that is why, ninety years on, the war is not over. Whether that claim is right is not for historians to settle; it is for Spanish citizens to prove, one way or the other, in the years ahead.

When the Routes Closed and the Men Vanished

In the summer of 1937, the Black Sea-Mediterranean route that had sustained Soviet arms deliveries was effectively closed. On 30 August the Soviet freighter Timiryazev was torpedoed by an Italian submarine off the Algerian coast; on 1 September the Blagoev was sunk near the Greek island of Skyros. Both were unarmed merchant vessels, but Italy was already waging an undeclared submarine campaign against all shipping bound for Republican Spain. Stalin ordered that no more Soviet-flagged ships be sent on the direct Mediterranean route, and he deemed even Republican vessels carrying Soviet arms too risky: the southern route was abandoned wholesale. The Nyon Conference that September saw Britain and France agree to Mediterranean patrols against Italian submarines, but by then the USSR had already turned north.

The northern route ran from Murmansk or Leningrad through the Baltic and North Seas to French ports. But it was never smooth. French authorities deliberately delayed the transshipment of weapons; Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky called it 'the incredible corruption of the entire French governmental apparatus.' Bribes rarely sped things up, and thirty-three Soviet aircraft seized by the French in December 1936 were not released until September of the following year. Worse, in June 1938 France closed the border again, and the final convoy of seven ships, carrying arms desperately needed in Catalonia, never reached the front. Stalin's resolution to Voroshilov was terse: 'The delivery of arms has to be abandoned. Stalin.'

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, the men who had been in Spain were disappearing. At the height of the Yezhovshchina in 1937–1938, the NKVD classified anyone who had 'contact with foreigners' as a suspect by default, and a Spain posting was itself a fatal liability. Chief military adviser Yan Berzin was recalled in June 1937 and shot in July 1938. His successor Grigory Shtern was recalled in 1938 and executed in 1941. The first ambassador, Marcel Rosenberg, was recalled in February 1937 and shot in March 1938; his replacement Leon Gaikis lasted barely three months before being recalled and purged. Consul General in Barcelona Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, trade representative Artur Stashevsky, military adviser Vladimir Gorev, Pravda correspondent Mikhail Koltsov: all were executed between 1937 and 1940. The NKVD station chief in Spain, Alexander Orlov, alone sensed his fate and fled with his family to the West in July 1938, saving his life.

Right at this moment, the Republic was preparing its last great offensive. In April 1938, Nationalist forces reached the Mediterranean at Vinaròs, cutting Republican territory in two and isolating Catalonia. Prime Minister Juan Negrín and chief of staff Vicente Rojo authorized an Ebro River crossing to divert Franco's advance on Valencia and to show Europe that the Republic was still a going concern. At dawn on 25 July, the 80,000-strong Army of the Ebro under Juan Modesto crossed the river in rowboats and on pontoon bridges. In three days they retook 800 square kilometers and captured 4,000 prisoners, but the offensive stalled before the town of Gandesa. Franco ordered the dam sluices opened, washing away the pontoon bridges; the Condor Legion and Italian air force bombed the bridges by day, and Republican engineers rebuilt them every night. Only twenty-two tanks and a handful of artillery pieces made it across. What followed was four months of First World War-style attrition. On the Nationalist side, 500 cannon fired over 13,000 rounds a day and 200 aircraft dropped 10,000 pounds of bombs. August temperatures hit 37°C in the shade; with water scarce, the wounded could only be evacuated at night, in small boats.

Amid the battle, on 21 September 1938, Negrín announced at the League of Nations in Geneva the unilateral withdrawal of the International Brigades. It was a political gesture aimed at the Non-Intervention Committee, which had repeatedly demanded the withdrawal of foreign volunteers, but with 50,000 Italians and Germans still fighting for Franco, the Republic was giving up its roughly 10,000 foreign fighters in an asymmetric concession. On 28 October, at a farewell parade in Barcelona, Dolores Ibárruri addressed 13,000 assembled Internationals: 'You are history. You are legend.' Ten days later, on 16 November, the Battle of the Ebro ended with Republican forces pushed back across the river to their starting line. Popular Army casualties exceeded 41,000; the so-called 'Army of Catalonia' had ceased to exist as a fighting force.

Between the army destroyed at the Ebro and the advisers shot in Moscow lay a shared paradox. The men who had come to save the Republic were killed at home because they had been there; the Republic's last offensive was launched after the international support it depended on had already dried up.

Neither Surrender nor Escape Was Granted

After the Popular Army was broken at the Ebro, the Catalan front had nothing left to hold with. On 23 December 1938 three hundred thousand Nationalist troops crossed the Segre and began the offensive; of the 220,000 Republican soldiers facing them fewer than half had rifles. General Hernández Saravia reported that there were only seventeen thousand rifles in all of Catalonia. The Soviet Union dispatched 250 aircraft and 250 tanks, but the shipment did not reach Bordeaux until 15 January and only a fraction crossed the border. In Barcelona the daily ration was down to a hundred grams of lentils. The city fell on 26 January.

From this point an unbridgeable rift opened between prime minister Negrín and the rest of the Republican leadership. Negrín, under the slogan Resistir es vencer (to resist is to win), believed that the coming European war would force Britain and France to intervene. But when Franco's troops reached the French border on 9 February, the president of the Republic, Manuel Azaña, and the chief of staff, Vicente Rojo, crossed into France and refused to return. On 13 February Franco published the Law of Political Responsibilities, retroactive to October 1934, which made every supporter of the Republic a criminal. On 27 February Britain and France formally recognized Franco's government. Azaña resigned the next day. Negrín had no bargaining chips left.

And yet when Negrín insisted on fighting on from the central zone, the commander of the Army of the Centre, Colonel Segismundo Casado, staged a coup on 5 March. Branding the Negrín government a communist dictatorship, and backed by the Socialist Julián Besteiro and the CNT's Cipriano Mera, he set up a National Defence Council. Casado believed a fifth-column agent named José Cendaño who promised that Franco would guarantee the lives of officers who had committed no crimes. In Madrid the three Communist-controlled army corps fought back, and for a week a civil war within the civil war killed close to two thousand people. Mera's IV Corps secured Casado's victory, but Negrín and the communist leadership had already left for France.

Casado proposed peace terms: a guarantee against reprisals and a twenty-five-day period for anyone who wished to leave Spain. Franco's reply on 16 March was a single line: nothing but unconditional surrender. When Casado's envoys flew to Burgos on 23 March they were told to raise the white flag at once. On 26 March the Nationalist offensive began on all fronts and met no resistance. Madrid fell on 28 March. Casado fled to Valencia, and fifteen thousand refugees were trapped at the port of Alicante. The British freighter Stanbrook, whose captain Archibald Dickson ran the Francoist naval blockade, carried 2,638 of them to Oran, but it was the last ship out. When Italian troops entered Alicante on 31 March General Gambara was prepared to let political refugees evacuate, but arriving Francoist troops took over jurisdiction. Many committed suicide rather than be taken prisoner.

The more than four hundred thousand refugees who had crossed the Pyrenees were interned by the French authorities in improvised barbed-wire camps on the beaches at Argelès, Gurs, and Rivesaltes. With no shelter, no sanitation, and no cooking facilities, left on open sand, 14,672 of them died of malnutrition and dysentery in the first six months. On 1 April Franco declared the war over. Casado escaped on a British warship. Besteiro stayed in Madrid, was arrested, and died in prison in 1940.

The Battle the Historians Have Not Ended

The Spanish Civil War ended nearly ninety years ago, but among those who write its history another front remains open. Its axis is simple: why did the Republic lose, and what share did Soviet intervention have in that defeat?

The postwar synthesis was written by Hugh Thomas (1961), who saw the Communist centralizing line as militarily necessary while still describing the suppression of the POUM as 'a shabby business.' The American Gabriel Jackson (1965) went further, dismissing the POUM as 'unrealistic romantics' and broadly defending the Negrín line. Against this liberal school stood Burnett Bolloten, an American journalist who had reported from wartime Spain and spent the rest of his life assembling a vast collection of primary sources for his The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution (1991). His conclusion was blunt: the Communists had always seen the Popular Front as a transitional form toward a Soviet-style regime, and the crushing of the revolution was not a by-product of the war effort but its purpose.

Bolloten's challenge was transformed by the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s. Drawing on those documents, Spain Betrayed (2001) by Ronald Radosh and his co-editors used NKVD records to argue that Stalin was bent on establishing a people's republic in Spain, and Stanley G. Payne's The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (2004) further systematized the claim that Soviet goals were revolutionary from the start. Yet Ángel Viñas, the historian who has worked most deeply in the Moscow archives, reached a different conclusion. Tracking account books and payment records, he showed that the 510 tonnes of gold the Republic had deposited in Moscow were wholly exhausted by early 1938 paying for weapons, and that Franco's myth of Stalin 'stealing the gold' was a fabrication. Viñas also demonstrated that the scale of the Soviet intervention was far smaller than Cold War common sense had held.

For all this documentary evidence, the battle is unresolved. Reading the same Soviet documents, Helen Graham (2002) counters that Moscow 'struggled, often in vain, to understand what was going on' in Republican Spain. In her account, Negrín's rebuilding of the state was not dictated by Stalin but was the only survival strategy for a republic isolated by non-intervention. The Bolloten school asks: who will pick up a rifle after you have crushed his revolution? The Graham school answers: without rifles there will be no revolution to crush. Since 2000 the front has been further complicated by a wave of Spanish revisionists, notably Pío Moa, who have argued that primary responsibility for the war belongs to the left.

The sources are still being opened: the Operation X files in the Russian State Military Archive, Ambassador Pascua's personal papers in the Spanish National Historical Archive, and Comintern Executive Committee materials on Spain that remain only partly accessible. One thing is settled beyond dispute: the Spanish Republic was a government abandoned by the Western democracies, and the Soviet Union was the only great power that stepped into the vacuum, with a price tag attached. What the intent and effect of that intervention were has yet to be decided.