The Spanish Civil War historian who demolished Francoist myths with archival evidence
There is not a single conservative or neo-Francoist historian who does not manipulate the evidence; what they sell are bold-faced lies.
A historian, economist and diplomat who has systematically dismantled Francoist historical narratives through archival research on the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. Beginning with his investigation of Nazi Germany's financing of Franco's rising while a graduate student in Bonn, he demolished the myth of the 'Moscow Gold' in 1976 and went on to show, in a four-volume Republic series, how arms embargoes and international diplomacy decided the war. When the Royal Academy of History published a national biographical dictionary in 2011 that failed even to call Franco a dictator, Viñas rallied thirty historians and produced a 976-page counter-dictionary, En el combate por la Historia (2012), a watershed in Spain's 'history wars'.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1968Joined Corps of Spanish State Economists and Trade Experts, first in class
- 1971–1973Commercial counsellor, Spanish Embassy, Bonn
- 1974Published La Alemania nazi y el 18 de julio; PhD
- 1976Published El oro español en la Guerra Civil, debunking the Moscow Gold myth
- 1982Professor of Applied Economics, Complutense University; adviser to Foreign Minister
- 1986–2005EU Commission posts including Director for Asia and Latin America; EU Ambassador to the UN
- 2006–2009Tetralogy on the Republic: La soledad, El escudo, El honor, El desplome
- 2012Edited En el combate por la Historia, answer to the Royal Academy's biographical dictionary
Related historical events
Archival research on the Moscow Gold and its controversy
Viñas first entered the Moscow Gold question as a civil servant. Commissioned in 1974 by Enrique Fuentes Quintana, then director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, he produced El oro español en la Guerra Civil (1976), which the Ministry of Finance's technical secretariat held back from publication until the first democratic elections the following year. He went on to become one of the first Spanish historians to use the former Soviet archives, situating the gold sale within the internationalization of the Civil War. That experience, despite his participation in the opposition to Franco, led him not to join the Communist Party of Spain.
The core of the dispute lies in what his account leaves unresolved. Viñas concluded that the deposit was exhausted less than a year before the end of the war, spent entirely on armaments and on the costs of the operation. Pablo Martín Aceña and Francisco Olaya Morales criticized his hypothetical model as lacking the evidence to validate it fully, and Martín Aceña, noting that no documents have been found on either the Soviet or the Spanish side for the funds transferred to the Banque Commerciale de l'Europe du Nord in Paris, held that the investigation of the gold had not been fully closed. Where Viñas defends Negrín's management, considering him the great Republican statesman of the war and the transfer the only viable option, Martín Aceña sees a mistake that cost the Republic its financing capacity, and Olaya Morales calls Negrín's administration criminal and denies Viñas's arguments. Olaya Morales and Pío Moa countered that the harshest criticisms of Negrín came not from Francoism but from fellow Republicans such as Largo Caballero and Indalecio Prieto.
The dispute has older roots. In 1970 the Franco authorities censored an official Bank of Spain history because it included the economist Juan Sardá's findings, which demolished the Moscow Gold myth the dictatorship had cultivated. Viñas made dismantling that myth as a Francoist fabrication the focus of his research.