“I owe Spain a great deal,” Evan Shipman wrote to his good friend Ernest Hemingway on his return from Spain in June 1938. Shipman’s road to war followed a unique path that was influenced by the novelist. He traveled to Europe in February 1937 when Hemingway donated ambulances to the Republican government and asked Shipman to deliver them. Shipman turned over the ambulances to the American Medical Bureau in France and attempted to travel on to Spain. Shipman, whose passport was stamped “Not Valid For Travel to Spain,” was arrested by the French border patrol and jailed for his attempt to enter Spain with volunteers for the International Brigades. During his eight-week incarceration, Shipman formed a close bond with other volunteers.

When he was released from jail, Shipman completed his journey and enrolled in the International Brigades. After recovering from wounds sustained in action at Brunete, while serving with the Washington Battalion, Shipman remained at Murcia as hospital commissar. In January 1938, he transferred to Madrid, where he worked for the Ministry of Propaganda on Voice of Madrid. In the late spring of that year, Shipman returned to the Brigades. He moved to Barcelona, where he served briefly as the editor of Volunteer for Liberty before his repatriation. After his return to the United States, Shipman joined the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade and maintained a cordial relationship with them throughout his life, despite being essentially apolitical.

Evan Shipman might be forgotten were it not for his friendship with Ernest Hemingway. As Sean O’Rourke notes, most of what is written about Shipman in “literary histories and books about his better known friends is often incomplete, inaccurate, or just plain wrong.” O’Rourke’s well researched biography provides an engrossing narrative history of Shipman and his milieu that draws a more accurate picture of a complex character.

Shipman aspired to be a poet and author and published numerous poems and a novel; however, his indifference to financial matters, poor health, and a difficult marriage led him to make a living as a journalist. His intimate knowledge and love of horse racing, both in Europe and the U.S., led him to be memorialized as the “dean of American turf journalists” upon his death in 1957.

O’Rourke’s considerable research is evident. Over the course of five years, he delved into the archives of ALBA, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the Sorbonne. In each chapter O’Rourke frames Shipman’s life through the people with whom he interacted. A website with additional photographs, corrections, and amplifications can be found at EvanShipman.com.

Chris Brooks maintains ALBA’s biographical dictionary of the U.S. volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.

In the past, their commitment to the Quaker “Peace Testimony” had led American and British Friends to assist both the victors and the vanquished in the aftermath of a war. This was the first time that they served both sides in an ongoing war. In the cities of Barcelona, Valencia, and Murcia, located in the Republican zone, the FSC and the AFSC distributed milk and dried food to refugee children, pregnant and nursing women, and the elderly. In addition, in Murcia, under the energetic leadership of Francesca Wilson, the British Friends also set up a children’s hospital and workshops where the refugees could make clothing for themselves. While the FSC was not allowed to operate in Nationalist Spain, the AFSC set up a mission in Burgos. The Nationalist area, which had most of the agricultural land and very few of the refugees, did not need additional food supplies—at least in the first months of the war. The primary aim of the AFSC presence there was to ensure neutrality.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book lies in the difference in the Quakers’ experiences in the two zones. In the Nationalist area, the rebel authorities were opposed to the establishment of non-Falangist and non-Catholic canteens, obliging the AFSC to channel relief through the Falangist Welfare Service, Auxilio Social. The arrangement caused tensions within the Quaker relief unit. While Howard Kershner, the AFSC representative who coordinated the work of all relief agencies in Spain, believed that the Nationalists were civil and doing a great job, many of his colleagues resented being excluded from direct relief, as they could not guarantee the impartial distribution of aid. Adding to their resentment was the fact that the Nationalist authorities violated their agreements by reportedly exchanging wheat provided by the AFSC and other agencies for German munitions. The situation further deteriorated after the insurgents conquered Republican-held territory. In Murcia, the military confiscated relief supplies and closed the children’s hospital, and in Valencia, the police arrested the AFSC representative, Emmet Gulley. The main accusations leveled at the Quakers were that they were “Reds” and of lax morality. With the outbreak of World War II, the position of Friends workers became increasingly precarious and they began leaving Spain. The AFSC stopped relief work in Spain, using its funds instead to administer colonies of Spanish children in France and to assist Spanish refugees in Mexico and North Africa.

Mendlesohn’s account demonstrates how difficult it was for any individual or organization to remain impartial during the Spanish Civil War. It also adds valuable information to our knowledge of the refugee crisis that accompanied the conflict.

Isabelle Rohr is the author of The Spanish Right and the Jews (1898-1945): Antisemitism and Opportunism. She is a visiting lecturer at King’s College, University of London, and at St. Mary’s College, University of Surrey.

Diplomats are funny creatures. On the one hand, they embody an anachronistic kind of superficiality—all form, protocol, and etiquette. On the other, they are influential actors behind the scenes, no less devious or powerful than spies and secret agents. As the Wikileaks affair reminds us, diplomats function as their nations’ eyes and ears, helping governments read the situation on the ground, but they also work as lobbyists, striking deals and applying pressure. It was in this proactive capacity that the Spanish Republic desperately needed its full diplomatic corps when, in the summer of 1936, the democratically elected Popular Front government was confronted with a coup that quickly developed into a full-blown Civil War. Foreign governments, particularly fellow democracies, needed to be convinced that it was in their best interest—not to mention their moral duty—to stand by the beleaguered Spanish people. But there was a problem: the majority of Spanish diplomats almost immediately sided with the rebels.

How and why this happened, and precisely how the Republican leadership reacted to this massive defection, is the subject of this compelling new collection. Its nine chapters and extensive appendices provide a general overview of the Republic’s diplomatic efforts during the Civil War, while dealing in detail with the embassies and consulates in the Soviet Union (Ángel Viñas), the United Kingdom (Enrique Moradiellos), France (Ricardo Miralles), the United States (Soledad Fox), Switzerland (Elena Rodríguez Ballano), Mexico (Abdón Mateos), and Czechoslovakia (Matilde Eiroa). The collection is edited by Viñas, a prolific Spanish historian of the Republic and the Civil War, whose combativeness and rigor honor the legacy of the legendary Herbert Southworth, his friend and mentor.

Julio Aróstegui’s opening chapter shows that notions of loyalty and betrayal were absolutely central to the justification of individual actions, as well as to the Republic’s attempt to shore up its legitimacy within and outside of Spain. In the second chapter, Viñas gives a thorough overview of the Republic’s foreign policy efforts, taking advantage of the opportunity to debunk the host of myths, exaggerations, and untruths that continue to mar much of the existing work on the topic. Viñas insists on the need for rigorous research based on primary evidence from the time period, the increasing availability of which is allowing for a much more nuanced and complete picture of “what actually happened and, especially, why it happened.” Contrary to what right-wing historians claim, for instance, we can safely say that the Civil War did not safeguard Spain from a descent into social revolution or from falling prey to Stalin. It is by now also clear that, given the support the military rebellion received from Hitler and Mussolini, it should be considered part and parcel of interwar European power politics. More important, Viñas states that it is appropriate to see the events in Spain as the result of a betrayal. “[T]he Spain that struggled to break the shackles of social and cultural underdevelopment,” he states, was betrayed by fellow states (France, Britain, the United States) pursuing “a savage policy of protection of national self-interest, seasoned with ideological, political, and class connotations, and skewed by mistaken or prejudiced analyses of Spanish reality.”

Of special interest to American readers is Soledad Fox’s chapter on Spanish Ambassador Fernando de los Ríos, the affable and sophisticated law professor who spent all three years of the war in Washington, DC. Fox describes in fascinating detail why De los Ríos’ job was a “mission impossible.” While De los Ríos was successful in moving American public opinion to the side of the Republic and requesting that Congress lift the embargo that made it impossible for the Republic to purchase American arms—and while he had many friendly and less-than-friendly meetings with high-ups in the White House—in the end it didn’t matter: Roosevelt was simply too concerned with losing the Catholic vote to change his official stance of neutrality. In hindsight it is difficult not to see De los Ríos steadfast optimism that the U.S. would come to its moral and political senses as a form of self-delusion. Among De los Ríos’ few successes is the permission he secured in 1937 for Dr. Edward Barsky’s medical mission to travel to Spain.

The main conclusion to be drawn from this book is that the Republican diplomats did what they could, but the odds were against them. Their difficult job was further complicated by mixed signals from the divided Republican home front, some of whose foreign-policy initiatives were conducted without the diplomats’ knowledge. In the end, the Republican diplomats were as impotent as their leaders. If recent research has made anything clear, it is that the governments of the countries that mattered—Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union—were, from the outset, unwilling to let any moral or long-term strategic considerations impinge on the short-term, selfish interests that spelled the Republic’s doom, paving the way for the destruction of World War II.

Sebastiaan Faber, chair of the ALBA Board, is professor of Spanish literature at Oberlin College.

The Ivens story is only one of the many surprising pieces of information to be found in Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939, due to be published next month with the University of Wisconsin Press (read an excerpt here, purchase the book here). Other revelations include definite proof of Buñuel’s Communist Party membership, the political intentions of Land without Bread, the nature of his propaganda work in Paris, and his role in the elusive Civil War compilations Espagne 1936 and Espagne 1937. A joint Spanish-British effort by film scholars Román Gubern and Paul Hammond, The Red Years (a revised English version of their 2009 Los años rojos) covers a crucial decade not only in the filmmaker’s life but in the history of film and photography—as well as the history of Spain and the world. As they follow Buñuel from Madrid to Paris to the United States, the authors painstakingly connect the dots of an intricate, transnational network of friendships, alliances, conflicts, and projects. It’s hard to imagine any future biography Buñuel surpassing Gubern and Hammond in exhaustiveness and virtuosity.

Buñuel, who spent the postwar years as an exile in Mexico, was the groundbreaking creator, with his friend Salvador Dalí, of the surrealist masterpieces Chien andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (1930), and directed more than thirty feature films including Los olvidados (1950) and Belle de Jour (1967). He was also an obsessive practical joker and poseur, notoriously difficult to pin down; he enjoyed nothing more than to goad his audience and hoodwink his interviewers, leaving a trail of scandal and confusion. Armed with decades’ of archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, Gubern and Hammond manage to cut through the layers of legend and anecdote, revealing Buñuel as a key figure in the Republican public-relations effort during the Spanish Civil War and as a canny operator and propagandist whose decisions were driven as much by artistic and political convictions as by fear and, occasionally, opportunism.

Román Gubern in Portland, February 2011. Photo Sebastiaan Faber

“Buñuel was a consummate chameleon,” Gubern said when I met with him in Portland, Oregon last February (video coming soon), “in aesthetic as much as political terms. In the 1920s, he was a surrealist; in the 1930s, a Communist and propagandist; during his postwar exile in Mexico he filmed commercial melodramas to make a living, while he also worked closely with American blacklisted filmmakers such as Hugo Butler. And in the 1960s and ‘70s, in France, he gave surrealism a new lease on life with films like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty.”

“Right below that chameleonic surface, however, lurked a deep unity of purpose. Buñuel’s life is the story of a moral and political rebellion—a rebellion against the conservative culture of 1920s Spain, ruled by a reactionary monarchy and an immensely powerful, retrograde Catholic church. At first, surrealism provides Buñuel with the tools to rebel; and surrealism leads him to the Communist Party. But our book also shows that Buñuel was a man of flesh and blood, a human being with weaknesses who tried to survive in difficult times. I would not say he was an exemplary human being in moral or ethical terms. He was a physical coward—this is no criticism, I myself am one, too—and his first instinct was often to save his skin.”

The author of some fifty books, Gubern is Spain’s most prolific scholar of visual and mass media (film, television, comics). A kind of Catalan Marshall MacLuhan, he taught at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and has written films and documentaries. During several stays in the United States, Gubern met a number of Lincoln veterans. In 1969, together with Jaime Camino and Alvah Bessie (Lincoln vet and one of the Hollywood Ten), he made España otra vez, which tells the story of an American doctor who volunteered in the Spanish Civil War and returns years later to search for his Spanish lover. The film was a commercial flop but marked a milestone: “It was the first film produced in Franco´s Spain in which the Republican does not end up converting to the Nationalist cause.”

Gubern (1934) was born into the Catalan bourgeoisie. He became involved in the anti-Francoist resistance in the 1950s as a college student; he joined the Communist Party, leaving it in 1968. As director of the Barcelona student film club, Gubern was the first in Franco´s Spain to screen Buñuel’s controversial 1932 documentary Land without Bread. “I have to confess that the film threw me off,” he remembers. “At that point I hadn’t even seen Chien andalou. I knew of course that Buñuel was a cinematic giant, so I had high expectations—but in fact I was a bit disappointed, the film seemed strangely bland.” Still, with the help of Basilio Martín Patino, the print that Gubern had secured was shown at film clubs throughout the country—“It was screened to shreds.”

“Buñuel is one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema, that’s beyond discussion. He was the first to systematically introduce the subconscious as a dramatic element in movies. Without Buñuel, Hitchcock could not have made Psycho. Nothing in what we found denies Buñuel´s importance—but our book does invite the audience to re-read his work, and to reconsider his place in the twentieth-century history of ideas.”

Sebastiaan Faber is Chair of ALBA’s Board of Governors.

Review published in American Studies, Vol 50, Nos 3/4, Fall/Winter, 2009.

This is an impressive piece of scholarship, which combines admirable bibliographic and archival research with clear, engaging prose.  Throughout the book’s five main chapters, Schreiber painstakingly reconstructs the biographical and artistic trajectories of a talented and diverse group of cultural workers who, in the heat of the Cold-War induced witchhunts, sought political and creative refuge in Mexico.

Read the entire review here: Cold War Exiles in Mexico

Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain.

In the past 10 years, organizations both in Spain and abroad have vindicated the need to honor victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Their political pressure resulted in the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, which aims to pay homage to the victims’ memories. The contributors to this volume memorialize victims by looking at a number of phenomena that illuminate their faces and voices. The book offers four perspectives: historical; visual; literary; and anthropological. Each section begins with commentaries that engage in intelligent dialogue with the ensuing essays. It is fitting that the Guardian’scorrespondent in Spain, Giles Tremlett, writes the afterword, as journalists have been instrumental in the process of recovering memory.

Historian Paul Preston’s essay provides vast evidence of the political Right’s anti-Semitism as early as 1912 and its belief that the Socialist revolution had been organized by Jews. The association of Judaism with the Left sheds light on the brutal repression of the initial months of the war as well as subsequent xenophobia. Preston ends by linking the rhetoric of Francoist repression to the “theorists of extermination.” This essay previews his newly published book, The Spanish Holocaust (2011), where he compares Franco’s crimes with the Holocaust. Julián Casanova, an expert on the role of the Church in the Francoist period, offers a detailed description of the “vengeful” phase of the regime. This period in the early years of the dictatorship accounts for more than 50,000 victims.

Documentary television and film present the clearest picture of Franco’s victims. Jo Labanyi’s essay demonstrates that victim testimony is crucial to our comprehension of past events. Furthermore, she argues that testimonial interviews, as they appear in many documentaries, acquire full meaning in the realm of feelings. Although the victims’ narratives are inherently subjective, they prove central to the understanding of history.

The second essay of this section is by television reporter Montse Amengou, who describes how investigative journalism serves as a tool for recovering historical memory, which indeed has been the case in Spain. Gina Herrmann analyzes one of Armengou’s documentaries made for Catalan television, Les fosses del silenci [Graves of Silence] (2003), and compares it to Las fosas del olvido [Graves of Oblivion] (2004) by Adolfo Domingo and Itiziar Bearnaola, which was broadcast by Spanish television. While both address the excavations of mass graves, Domingo’s report suggests that the exhumations have brought closure to the victims’ families. However, Armengou points out that most mass graves in Spain remain uncovered.

Much like documentary film, literature provides a voice to the victims. Samuel Amago, in his essay “Speaking for the Dead: History, Narrative, and the Ghostly in Javier Cercas’s War Novels,” analyzes the best-selling Soldados de Salamina [Soldiers of Salamis] as well as the lesser known La velocidad de la luz[The Velocity of Light]. He concludes that the role of the narrator/writer serves a vindicating function.

The last section addresses the physical excavations of mass graves. Fernández de Mata explains their meaning for the victims’ relatives as well as for the perpetrators through a discussion of painful testimonies. Along the same lines, Ferrándiz writes a perfectly balanced essay that begins and ends with the personal story of Esther Cimadevilla, whose father was killed and buried in a mass grave in Asturias. Her suffering provides a personal voice among the new generation of narratives about Spain’s violent past.

Unearthing Franco’s Legacy is a seminal reference for Spanish Memory Studies. The volume’s front cover is a composite of a bright red image of Franco and a photograph of a mass grave by Catalan artist Francesc Torres. The image of the dictator superimposed over the mass grave provides readers with a reminder that Franco’s legacy is consumed by human remains drowning in a pool of blood. In order to repair their pain, the editors dedicate the book “To those who fought and continue to fight for justice and the defense of democratic rights, arduously gained, perilously maintained.”

Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain. By Gina Herrmann. University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Written in Red analyzes the life writing of six Spanish Communists: Dolores Ibárurri, Jorge Semprún, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Teresa Pàmies and Tomás Pàmies. Notwithstanding significant stylistic and political differences, their writing shares a preoccupation with the personal and political legacies of civil war and exile. As Herrmann notes, “these writers represent familiar roles lived out by the kind of people who were attracted to Communism: party leader, intellectual, artist, resistance fighter, journalist, and proletarian.” Equally importantly, they represent different relationships to Communism and to Stalinism—a major theme throughout the book.

As the first detailed study of Communist memoir in 20th century Spain, this book offers a brilliant analysis of the relationship between political commitment and activism, personal relations and affect. Of particular interest to scholars of Spanish history, politics and literature, it should also be read by students of Communist culture, since it locates Spain within the field of Communist cultural studies and draws on an impressive array of comparative works from the former USSR, Eastern Europe, and the United States. While not a straightforward history of the civil war or the Communist Party, this literary study admirably contextualizes the works in question within this larger history. Its engagement with a range of contemporary theorists sets it in the best tradition of literary and cultural studies.

The book revolves around two sets of fundamental tensions: between conviction and remorse, and between the individual life and “the social and collective terms within which the Communist subject was supposed to understand and present him or herself.” The movement back and forth between common themes and political and aesthetic differences is facilitated by the book’s structure. With the exception of the first chapter, dedicated to Ibárruri’s autobiography, the book reads two or more writers alongside each other, bringing out convergences and tensions between them and Communist memoir. Chapter 2 examines the memoirists’ early lives and their conversion to Communism. Chapter 3—appropriately the center of the book—covers the war in Spain. Reflecting the recent “affective turn” in the humanities, political and personal legacies of the conflict are examined through emotional expression in the memoirs: happiness, shame, love, guilt. While the central distinction is between women’s and men’s memories of war, it is here that the common features in the work of all six writers are brought out most clearly.

In the final chapters, the categories “organic” and “dissolutive” Communist memoir are put to productive use. Chapter 4 examines Léon and Alberti—wife and husband, lifelong Communist artists, and prominent figures in the Spanish exile community. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of “Left Melancholia” and Wendy Brown’s more recent reworking of this, Herrmann explores the haunting themes of exile, nostalgia, and melancholia. Alberti is—alongside Semprún—the most famous writer among these memoirists and occupies a privileged position within Spain as a respected poet. Perhaps as a caution against the mythologizing of heroes common to all wars, Herrmann highlights Alberti’s complicity in the silences surrounding the atrocities of Stalinism. Most intriguing and original here is her use of Alice Kuzniar’s work on dogs and melancholia to contrast Alberti’s obsessive representation of canine pets with the absence of Stalinist horrors: “So little Communism, so many dogs.”

Another absence in Alberti’s memoir is his wife, with whom he lived for the entire period of the war and exile; the contrast between the prominent place of Alberti in Leon’s memoir and his almost total failure to mention her is one example of the gender analysis that weaves through the book.

Building on her previous work on female militant memories of the civil war, Herrmann analyzes Ibárruri’s performance of political motherhood and widowhood and contrasts women’s ambivalent feelings about the war experience with men’s expressions of shame in the face of ideals of masculinity in conflict. The gender politics of activism and writing are traced as well in the analysis of Testament à Praga, in which Teresa Pàmies intersperses her critical commentary with excerpts from diaries of her father, Tomás, a lifelong Communist activist and civil war veteran who never broke with the Party. This daughter-father dialogue also redresses the absence of Rosa, Teresa’s mother, from Tomás’s narrative. Reading texts in relation to one another highlights themes of absence and shame in the overlapping spheres of the personal and political.

Teresa Pàmies’s autobiographical corpus is, alongside that of Jorge Semprún, an example of the “dissolutive” memoir, and the two authors are the subjects of the final chapter. With the turn to these “compulsive, serial autobiographers,” the book comes to the end of its trajectory: from youth and conversion through war and activism and finally to the “deconversion memoir.” The turning point in both cases is the 1952 Prague show trials.

Herrmann resists any temptation of a triumphant reading of the work of Pàmies and Semprún as post-Communist, insisting that even as they refuse to hide from the horrors of Stalinism, both writers show ongoing commitment to Communist values of solidarity. Citing the scholar of American Communist writing Charity Scribner, Herrmann labels the works of Pàmies and Semprún “requiems for Communism” for their “refusal to accept the fait accompli of late capitalism as the only imaginable frame of our world.” This conclusion is simultaneously conscious of the historical context out of which these memoirs emerge. Like the dissolutive Communist memoirs with which it closes, the book stresses the enormity of the losses brought by the Communist project while expressing an awareness of what has been lost with its demise.

Editors’ note: This review first appeared in the Revista de Libros, no. 154 (Oct. 2009). The editors thank the Revista for granting permission to publish it in the original English version.

The three books under consideration in the present review constitute, without a doubt, the most detailed and fully documented archival studies of the international diplomatic and military reactions to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; and also of the efforts of the successive Republican governments to overcome the politico-economic hostility of the major democratic powers—England, France, and the United States—and to counter the massive military aid given from the start by Italy, Germany, and Portugal to the forces led by General Franco. These last efforts in turn obliged the Republic to depend upon the Soviet Union, Mexico, and the International Brigades as the only forces willing and able to help the Republic defend itself.

To provide the potential reader with a more specific idea of the events dealt with in each of the three volumes: Soledad opens with the realization that although the Republic is an internationally recognized, democratically chosen government, it is, for a variety of reasons, not going to receive any help from the democratic powers in defending itself against the military uprising of July 18. On the other hand, within a week of the pronunciamiento, Italy, Germany, and Portugal have pledged their military aid to General Franco, and the Conservative government of Great Britain has indicated to the French that England will not look favorably on any French moves to aid the Republic. Within Spain it quickly seems imperative to replace the timid middle class Republican government of José Giral with a government representing the entire Popular Front, and led by Francisco Largo Caballero, by far the most wellknown and respected leader with a working class following. The Soviet Union joins the Non-Intervention Committee being organized on Franco-British initiative, but when in early September it is already evident that that committee will not make any real effort to stop the flow of Italo-German aid to General Franco, Stalin decides to give limited aid to the Republic. The first Soviet arms, and also food and medical supplies, reach Spain in the second half of October, 1936.

Escudo deals with the months during which Largo Caballero was both Prime Minister and Minister of War, from September 4, 1936 to mid-May of 1937. Largo’s age, and his lifelong experience as a trade union leader, left him really without the ability to function as a military leader, and Viñas concentrates on the efforts of Prieto, who as Minister of the Navy actually functioned as a de facto Minister of Defense, and on Juan Negrín, who as Minister of Hacienda was the principal governmental figure involved in the efforts to buy arms on the international and black markets, and to reorganize the corps of carabineros as a frontier and financial police. Negrín also arranged, with the Soviet economic advisers, and explained to the relevant cabinet members, his plans for the export of the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain to the Soviet Union as the only destination outside Spain where those reserves would be available to finance the defense of the Republic. Viñas’ experience as an economist, diplomat, and student of financial and banking institutions make those chapters absolutely unique in their information and documentation.

Escudo also treats in considerable detail the cabinet conflicts leading to the fall of Largo Caballero, the “hechos de mayo” in Barcelona, the decline of anarchist and POUM political power in Catalonia, the replacement of Largo Caballero by Negrín as Prime Minister, and the kidnapping and assassination of Andreu Nin.

The third volume, El Honor de la República, begins with the loss of the Basque country, deals with the efforts of Prime Minister Negrín, Defense Minister Prieto, and chief of staff Colonel (later General) Vicente Rojo to create a competent, sufficiently armed Republican army. While the combined efforts of loyal Spanish officers, former militia leaders of the emergency defense of Madrid in November-December, 1936, and Soviet military advisers, does indeed produce a competent army, the quantity of Italo-German military aid to General Franco is so much larger than that of the Soviet Union to the Republic, that with the exception of the first few weeks of the Battle of Teruel, and the first few days of the Battle of the Ebro, the Nationalists are constantly victorious. Viñas analyzes both the internal strengths and weaknesses of the Republican forces; also the concerns of the Soviets with the threat of Japan along the borders of Siberia, and the necessary Soviet attention to Hitlerite Germany and to a hostilely conservative England, as being inevitably more important to Stalin than the fate of Republican Spain. For the author, the honor of the Republic is most fully embodied in the resistance policy of Prime Minister Negrín, and in his efforts to govern as a civilian leader, accountable to the Cortes and to the President of the Republic.

The books are written simultaneously as scholarly treatises, to expound the truth on the basis of archival documentation, and as phillippics, to repair the injustices done to the intentions and the actions of the Spanish Republican governments during the Civil War. Scornful (but also accurate) footnotes and numerous parenthetical comments within the text itself contain detailed commentaries on works glorifying Franco and his dictatorship; works by both Spaniards and foreigners defending the biases of the Vatican, the Spanish Church, Falangist and Carlist advocates, several varieties of non-Stalinist Marxism, and anarchism. In pursuit of his documentary research the author has traveled to Paris, London, Moscow, and many other specific sites at which relevant archives are located. He has supplied detailed footnotes for all his controversial interpretations. He has listed the acronyms for dozens of archives, provided a massive bibliography, given the reader a long list of dramatis personae, and supplied copies of important documents. In pursuit of his critical, historiographical purpose he has quoted, and refuted, hundreds of strong statements by named persons and institutions.

Taken together, the three volumes provide some 1800 pages of text and footnotes. Viñas’ style is at once narrative, explanatory, and argumentative. He is both a passionate and exigent supporter of the Republican leaders. To obtain the full benefit of these three books the reader must be able to shift his attention frequently between the discussion of events, the footnote references to the various sources underpinning the narrative, and the interpretation or distortion of those events by other writers. But if he/she has the patience to make those shifts of attention, the results will be rich both in factual knowledge and differences of interpretation. Having attempted above to name the subjects covered in each of the three volumes, I will now comment on a few separate chapters.

Chapter 9 of Escudo, pp. 331-368, concentrates on the communications between Stalin, Largo Caballero, and Ambassador Marcelino Pascua; and the light which those communcations can throw on the attitude of the Soviet dictator towards the Spanish Republic. It is based principally on reports of Ambassador Pascua, and on material from the British Foreign Office which is much more detailed than the knowledge of Pascua. Thus in early February, 1937, in Geneva, Pascua had given a memorandum to Foreign Minister Del Vayo in which he stated that Stalin was preoccupied principally with the the internal development of a socialist society in the Soviet Union, and was concerned also with the military movements of Japan in the Far East. In addition, he was determined to build a large navy, the investment in which would inevitably limit, for the near future, improvements in the standard of living of the general population. Foreign Office reports on Soviet military-industrial activity indicated that the Soviets already had the world’s largest submarine fleet, and in many ways confirmed Pascua´s general interpretation while supplying much more specific data .

After informing the reader, with specific evidence, that Stalin very rarely intereviewed foreign diplomats (leaving that task principally to Molotov) the author discussed Pascua’s reports of the several conversations which Stalin granted him in early 1937. Stalin emphasized (repeating earlier written advice to Largo Caballero) the importance of reassuring the middle class and the peasants, that Western Europe, including Spain, was not ready for a socialist revolution, that the readiness of the populations to support the struggle against Fascism depended on the maintenance of free trade, and on the peasants’ feeling that they possessed the land which they were expected to cultivate.

He explained to Pascua that during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921 there had been huge spaces to which the Red Army could retreat if necessary; and also that the World War taking place between the main capitalist powers, and exhausting their human  resources, permitted the Soviets to take initiatives which Spain in 1937 could not take, even if an unspecified portion of its population would like to have carried out a new version of the Bolshevik revolution. Referring again mostly to British, and to some French, documents, Viñas notes that the Foreign Office in 1937 saw the Soviet Union as being weakened by the ongoing purges, while the fascist powers were becoming more powerful and aggressive. Both the opinions as to internal devlopments in Spain and the relative military strength of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy of course corresponded fairly closely with the opinions of parliamentary socialists such as Prieto, Negrín, and Pascua.

Stalin did not conceal his reservations about the fighting spirit of the Republic. He found the slogan “no pasarán” too passive, too much on the defensive psychologically. He wondered whether the lack of combat experience in World War I had left the Spaniards without a spirit of combat. Did they really want to win the war? Victory required an active, aggressive spirit, not just “no pasarán”. And by the way, the Republic must strengthen discipline, also “unmask” and “denounce” anarchist “intrigues.” Pascua explained the defensive military posture as due to the terrible experience of almost losing Madrid in the first days of November, 1936, and then of pouring their fullest energies into saving the battered capitral. Stalin agreed that the Republic must retain Madrid, otherwise the Soviets would have to “reconsider” their position.

As for Prime Minister Largo Caballero, who was more interested in labor union political power than in mostly middle class parliaments, in his letter thanking Stalin for the arms, food and medical supplies, pilots and military advisers, he also wrote, and Viñas quotes him directly (p. 337): “Cualquiera que sea la suerte que lo por venir reserva a la institución parlamentaria, ésta no goza entre nosotros, ni aún entre los republicanos, de defensores entusiastas.”  {NB: “lo por venir” is exactly how the words are printed}.

Later pages of the same chapter contain information, all of it based on diplomatic and military reports, concerning Soviet relations with China and Japan, mutual attitudes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the incredibly naïve effort mounted by Luis Araquistáin to “buy off” Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy with some of the Bank of Spain gold, and some of the inaccurate memories of Largo Caballero, involving differences between his memoirs and archival evidence. There is also some discussion, though in much less detail than in other chapters, of the ways in which the clearly non-revolutionary program of the Soviet Union and of the Spanish Communist Party resembled the parliamentary socialist program of the Prietistas and later of the Negrín government.

Having given a thoroughly admiring summary of the contents of the trilogy, I do think it important to mention a few reservations. To start with I must say two things which may sound contradictory: that I have learned something and been intellectually stimulated by almost every page, and that at times I have had to wonder whether the author was confusing new information with decisively important information. To do justice to both statements I would need forty or fifty pages. In a necessarily brief review, and assuming that the most useful function of a reviewer to his readers is to offer constructive criticism, I will discuss two instances in which the emphases sometimes puzzled me.

On pages 46 to 61 of Soledad the author treats the French decision of August, 1936, not to intervene on behalf of the Republic, but rather to try to establish a policy of Non-Intervention, a policy which hopefully would shorten the war and lead to a mediated settlement. The French government making the decision was the first government of the Popular Front. It consisted of Socialists and Radicals, and was also supported by the Communists, but without their supplying any ministers. The cabinet was divided in its sympathies, not strictly along party lines, since there were Radicals as well as Socialists who favored supplying military aid to the Republic, for reasons of French military security, and in support of a legitimate democratic government attacked by a military junta. But Léon Blum, the Socialist Prime Minister, was at first decidedly in favor of providing arms to the Republic, and the Socialists generally felt emotionally sympathetic to the Republic, whereas most Radicals simply preferred a legitimate and friendly government to a fascist-supported dictatorship.

In Viñas’ narrative, based on French and Spanish diplomatic documents of the time, the cabinet meeting of August 1 showed a majority of the members inclined not to aid the Republic militarily. The Vice-Premier and Minister of Defense, Edouard Daladier, was opposed. He knew that some members of the general staff were in favor of the Insurgents, and he was worried about the advisability of exporting arms which were needed for France´s own rearmament in the face of a hostile Germany. Also he, and many deputies of both parties, were rightly skeptical of any hope that Italy and Germany might agree to cease their aid to the military insurrection.

Ángel Viñas

On that same day, August 1, Foreign Minister Delbos (a Radical) had said in the Chamber of Deputies 1) that the Spanish government was a legitimate government friendly to France, 2) that nevertheless France was not planning to intervene, and 3) that France had interrupted the flow of arms to the Republic. As Viñas comments: “lo que había ocurrido en las bambalinas no se sabe con exactitud”, but a report dated September 20 by Luis Jiménez de Asúa, a member of the Republican arms buying committee in Paris, sheds at least circumstantial light on the problem. Asúa had had a secret meeting on the evening of August 3 with Finance Minister Vincent Auriol, a Socialist who was strongly sympathetic to the Republican cause. Auriol told Asúa that during the cabinet meeting Blum had pressed an unwilling Delbos to supply official permission to sell to Mexico the arms intended for Spain. Delbos thought the plan ridiculous when everybody knew that the arms were intended for Spain.

Delbos left the meeting before it was adjourned. Blum, Auriol, and Daladier continued the discussion, and decided that it would in fact make better sense to deal directly with the Madrid government. They then telephoned Delbos, who, according to the Asúa report, now gave his consent. On August 4-5 the newly arrived Spanish ambassador Alvaro de Albornoz was apprised of what types and quantities of arms were to be sent. He dispatched a confidential agent to the French military authorities in Bordeaux, along with payment in the form of a Spanish government check. But on the next day, August 6, a final export permit from the Quai d’Orsay did not arrive. Jiménez de Asúa now went to Blum´s home, and the latter wept bitter tears as he related that the British ambassador had spoken to Delbos, virtually directing France not to arm Spain, and on the contrary to propose a policy of Non-Intervention to all the major powers. He said that if France failed to do this, and if the war were to spread beyond the borders of Spain, England would not be able to defend France in those circumstances.

While the Viñas account decidedly adds new information to our knowledge of France´s decision not to sell arms to the Republic, and instead to propose the establishment of a Non-Intervention Committee, it does not add to our fundamental knowledge of the events described. As of July 24, when Léon Blum had been in London, he had been clearly warned by the British not to become involved on the side of the Republic. The major French, British, and American newspapers had carried the story within a few days. The British warning, and Blum’s feeling that he must at all costs not offend the British, was included in the Toynbee Survey of International Affairs for 1936, and in such early studies of the international aspects of the Civil as P.A.M Van der Esch, Prelude to War,

published in 1951, and Dante Puzzo, Spain and the Geat Powers, 1936-1941,published in 1962.

To move to a second subject, on pages 275 to 285 Viñas offers detailed new information about the decision of Stalin to intervene in the Civil War. He starts with an eleven line paragraph of doubts. In September, 1936, “parece ser” that Ambassador Rosenberg suggested that the Comintern send a military force armed with the latest weapons. “De ser cierto” this plan would have resulted from his analysis of the situation within Spain itself as of early August, when a change of government in Madrid was clearly foreseen. And, “si existió”, the Rosenberg plan would have been discussed while Moscow was evaluating all the available data which led to the Comintern decisions of September 16-19.(p. 275)

Also important were the visit of Maurice Thorez, General Secretary of the French Communist Party, to confer with Republican officials and Soviet Embassy personnel in Madrid; plus the arrivals in Spain in early September of André Marty, a founding member of the French Communist Party, and Manfred Stern, Soviet adviser to the newly formed Fifth regiment and to the Central Committee of the Spanish Communist Party. At the same time, between 11 September and 10 October, some 180 volunteers crossed the border at Cerbère, obliging the Soviets to think about their own image as self-appointed leaders of the world Marxist Left. The above facts were of course also important in feeding the hopes of the Republic that the Soviet Union might come to its aid militarily.

Following these facts, Viñas notes that food, clothing, and other humanitarian aid arrived in Soviet ships in late September, but that nothing official was being said about arms. He does refer to one source stating that 33 aircraft mechanics had arrived in September, to which he appends the one word comment: “sorprendente”. His main conclusions from the relatively sparse documentary evidence are that the Republic saw strong hints that the Soviet Union might intervene, and that for Stalin the themes of anti-fascist solidarity, and of Comintern world leadership, became increasingly important as a factor in Soviet considerations.

The author begins his direct disscussion of the decison to intervene by stating several other conclusions that his research has led him to: that the decision followed a “gradual acceleration” but that within the dynamic of acceleration Stalin always maintained the possibility of retreat. To the rhetorical question why such a retreat did not occur, Viñas’ reply is that the Soviet Union had to seek simultaneously to achieve collective security with the democratic powers and fulfill its role as the leader of a World Left that was becoming increasingly involved in the Spanish Civil War. In addition, Viñas is concerned to refute the anti-Communist historiography of the Civil War –that of the anarchists, Trotskyites, and POUMistas which claims that Stalin was determined to suppress the revolution which had broken out in the summer of 1936; and that of conservatives and Cold Warriors, which claims that Stalin was determined to establish in Spain a “popular democracy” of the type which he established in Eastern Europe after World War II.

After these general considerations he introduces important new evidence of genuine, and freely expressed, differences of opinion within the Soviet leadership. Foreign Minister Litvinov and the commissariat which he headed at first advocated not intervening in Spain. They were much more concerned to extend the Franco-Soviet and Franco-Czechoslovak defensive pacts into a general alliance for military security against Hitler, an alliance which would include not only England but also Rumania, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and of course the Soviet Union. In Viñas´s opinion Litvinov, who was married to an English woman, was quite anglophile, and never understood the extent of British governmental hostility to Soviet Russia. He quotes a letter of the Foreign Minister to the Soviet Ambassador in England , Ivan Maisky, dated June 25, 1937: “Si hubieramos permanecido al margen de la guerra civil, el resultado de esta postura hubiese sido un reforzamiento de nuestros vínculos con Gran Bretaña y Francia.” (p. 279)

He also quotes, as “un documento fundamental” a Litvinov telegram to Ambassador Rosenberg on September 4, 1936, reprimanding the latter for interfering in Spanish politics, and saying that since Rosenberg had been in Spain there had been many conversations in Moscow, the general conclusion of which was that it would be impossible to send arms to Spain. In Viñas’ opinion, Litvinov as of September 4 still hoped that the recently formed Non-Intervention Committee would in fact oblige the fascist powers to cease their support of the military junta. And his letter also reminds Rosenberg that newspaper reports are not final proofs. Viñas then proceeds to mention “valoraciones que, por desgracia, todavía no he visto documentados. Según tal fuente, Stalin se inclinaba hacia una política de completa neutralidad, Molotov se oponía y Vorochilov le apoyaba” (pp. 281-2) .

Thus Stalin, as of September 4, had not taken a decision. But the meeting of the Non-Intervention Committee on September 9, which completely rejected the ample evidence of Italo-German intervention, virtually destroyed any Soviet hope that international pressure would be put on the fascist powers to cease their evident, indeed boastful, intervention. According to Viñas, Molotov now asked for immediate aid to the Largo Caballero government. “Que había pasado? Lo que había pasado es que Stalin, desde Sochi (his summer residence on the Black Sea) había empezado a dar comienzo a su propio giro, que Molotov se plegaba rápidamente, y que las solemnes declaraciones de no intervención se revelaban como un auténtico fracaso.” (p. 282) I find the verb “plegaba” puzzling, since Molotov has just been characterized as opposing a policy of complete neutrality, but the important point is that different advisers thought differently and dared to express their thoughts in the midst of the purges gathering momentum after the trial and executions of the “Old Bolsheviks” Zinoviev and Kamenev.

According to Viñas, Stalin, while vacationing at Sochi, must have realized that the Republic was not necessarily facing defeat, and also that eventual victory would require military aid substantially equivalent to that being given by the fascist powers to Franco. This strategic element (Viñas’s adjective) dominated Stalin´s thinking, but it was accompanied by a determination to give battle without quarter to the “facción zinovievista-trotskista.”. After which the author devotes four full pages to the complex relationships of various Comintern officials, NKVD officers, and Politbureau members, and to the “reasoning” and progress of the purges. One of the main purposes of these pages, in the author’s own words, is to show that “Este es un escenario algo más complejo que el que consiste en hipertrofiar la noción de que lo que Stalin persiguió desde el primer momento era establecer una base que apoyara la constitución en España de un remedo de república popular avant la lettre”. (p. 288, author’s italics)

Personally I have no doubt that Stalin was obsessed with the many forms of  opposition (real and delusional) which he was determined to kill off, but he could have sent NKVD agents to Spain without deciding to send either food and medicines (without payment), or arms (with eventual high payment). So that the author’s detailed discussion of the purges at this point strikes me as responding more to his preoccupations with the claims of anti-Republican scholars than with Stalin’s decision in late September, 1936 to intervene militarily in the Civil War.

In the above paragraphs I have tried to indicate what seem to me occasional emphases which distract from the main task, and which have occupied a lot of space because I wished the reader to see the author`s judgments rather than just the reviewer´s assertions of those judgments. But this is in no sense meant as a negative evaluation. No one has combed the archives more thoroughly than Viñas. No one has been more ready to share information, or more eager to compare interpretations with colleagues. When reading these volumes I was reminded of a conversation we had had about forty years ago while Angel was driving me to the airport in Madrid. He had remarked on how important to Spaniards had been the contribution of foreign scholars to the study of the Civil War. I had said that we, the foreign scholars, had had the great good fortune to read sources that were off limits for Spaniards because of the dictatorship. We had benefitted directly from the desire of that same dictatorship to convince us that there was complete liberty of investigation (with the exception of the military archives) in Spain of the 1960’s. I was confident that one day soon the Spaniards would have the opportunity freely to write their own history. I hoped that one of the first to do so would be Angel Viñas. This trilogy will stand as a uniquely rich combination of archive-based history and deliberately challenging debate in the struggle for an objective understanding of the Spanish Civil War.

Gabriel Jackson has written many books about the Spanish Republic, most recently a biography of Juan Negrín. Read an interview with Jackson here.

Juan Negrín: Physiologist, Socialist and Republican War Leader. By Gabriel Jackson. Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press 2010. (First published in Spanish in 2009 by Editorial Crítica, Barcelona.) (Buy the book at Powell’s and support ALBA.)

Juan Negrín y López, the “enigmatic” leader of the Spanish Republic from May 1937 until its defeat in March 1939, has not been treated kindly in many histories of the Civil War. Some attacks have been personal, with critics scoffing at his “lavish spending…his delight in pretty women and his gargantuan eating and drinking.” Others have lambasted Negrín’s disorganized work habits and high-handed, dictatorial style. But it is Negrín’s role in the shipping of the Republic’s gold reserve to Moscow and his inability to prevent the persecution and murder of “Trotskyists” by Russian agents operating in Spain that have been particularly seized upon and have led to his denigration as a Communist stooge, a tool of Stalin’s apparent control of the Spanish Republic.

Gabriel Jackson’s new sympathetic biography of Negrín presents a rather different image of the Canarian university physiology professor: a highly intelligent, unassuming, and thoroughly decent man. Jackson recounts details of Negrín’s life before, during, and after the war, his intellectual background, and his personal life. However, though Jackson makes use of considerable previously unseen archival material, details are, on occasion, somewhat vague. As Jackson says, Negrín was a man “with an extremely reserved interior,” and documentary records appear to be almost as elusive as the figure himself. Negrín kept no diary and was not in the habit of saving his correspondence. Many official papers were accidentally destroyed during the war, others afterwards deliberately by his lifelong companion, Feli, acting on Negrín’s personal instructions. The lack of sources means that the early chapters are frustrating, for we learn little about Negrín’s early life, and Jackson is often forced to guesswork. However, when we come to the Second Republic and the war itself, the book is on much firmer ground.

Jackson argues that though the much-derided Negrín was a determined war leader, he was no dictator, but was at heart a moderate socialist and a humanitarian. Like his fellow socialist, rival and one-time friend Prieto, Negrín did what he could to stop the paseos, the murder of imagined enemies of the Republic by “uncontrollables.” He issued passports and wrote personal letters to help political opponents flee Spain, and on one occasion, as Jackson approvingly relates, Negrín slept in a prison in order to limit the blood-letting. And while Negrín himself was secular, he firmly believed in restoring religious freedoms and worked hard to secure the release of imprisoned clerics.

Likewise, Jackson explains how Negrín’s lack of action over the murder of Andreu Nin by the NKVD and the Republic’s brutal suppression of the POUM need to be seen within the context of the Republic’s absolute dependence on Soviet military aid. Russia was the Republic’s only ally, and Negrín knew that meant he must do his utmost not to offend Stalin. This is not to say that Negrín, or Jackson for that matter, condoned the actions of the NKVD in Spain, but that unless Negrín was absolutely sure that the Russian agents were responsible for Nin’s disappearance and presumed murder, he could not afford to rock the boat.

On the infamous sale of the Republican gold reserves to Moscow, Jackson confirms that the impetus came from Spain, rather than from Russia as Negrín’s detractors would have us believe. Jackson tackles head-on the popular notion that the Republic’s war effort was dictated by Stalin, rather than Negrín. To Jackson, Negrín’s determination to maintain his—and Spain’s—independence has been sorely underestimated. Jackson explains why Negrín had such close links with Communists and why Negrín was determined to carry on fighting right to the end, when other senior Republicans such as Azaña, Prieto, and others knew that the game was up.

The answer, of course, was that Negrín and the Spanish Republic didn’t have the luxury of choice. Facing a superior army, boosted by troops from Morocco, Italy, Germany, and Portugal, and deserted by the countries that might have helped, Negrín and the Spanish Republic fought on because Franco would never have accepted a negotiated peace. Negrín was forced to accept whatever help he could get, however tainted and whatever the consequences for Stalin’s fourth internationalist scapegoats. Negrín worked closely with the Communist Party not because he was himself a Communist, or even a fellow traveler, but because they were the most resolute defenders of the Republic. Like them, he was determined to fight on until General Casado’s military coup on March 5, 1939, ended any pretense of continuing resistance.

This bleak reality provides the context for Jackson’s portrayal of Negrín. For Negrín, like the second Spanish Republic, there was no happy ending. Continuing squabbles with Prieto over Republican money ensured that Negrín was effectively sidelined after 1945, and he died of a heart attack in 1956. In this new biography Jackson argues that Negrín was treated unfairly. Some may disagree but, at the very least, Jackson’s study clearly shows that Negrín’s role in the final year of the doomed Spanish Republic has been worthy of reappraisal.

The Anatomy of a Moment is extensively researched, rigorous with the facts. It is not only history, though, for where the facts end Cercas enters people’s minds and speculates on their motives. … Cercas moves back and forth from historical background to the tense events of the long, cold night of 23 February, when the whole Parliament is held captive and the whole country crouches in suspense around their radios. Certain parts may make heavy going for English-language readers without direct knowledge, but Cercas is a masterly storyteller: the more analytical passages are rarely dull and the book is rich with vivid images, paradox and action.(Eaude)

Cercas first wrote the story as a novel; then he changed his mind. The more he discovered about the coup, the more he explored what he calls “a shimmering labyrinth of almost always irreconcilable memories” the more he came to feel that “for once, reality mattered more to me than fiction”. … Cercas is not only writing a scrupulous, truthful account of the failed coup, he is helping to bring the tormented story of the Spanish Civil War to its conclusion at last. His subtle intelligence, narrative gifts and intellectual honesty are outstanding. (Chisholm)

More here. Buy the book at Powell’s and support ALBA.