Historical Events

The Spanish Civil War

The military rising of July 1936 was checked not by the government but by the arming of the unions, and in Catalonia and Aragon that response became a revolution in which factories and land passed into the workers' hands. While the Non-Intervention Agreement pushed by Britain and France blocked the legal government from buying arms, Germany and Italy armed the rebels, and in practice only the Soviet Union and Mexico would sell to the Republic. Soviet intervention kept the Republic standing, but it also sharpened the quarrel between those who held that the war had to be won before the revolution and those who answered that stopping the revolution would remove the reason to fight, until in May 1937 the argument broke into street fighting in Barcelona.