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  • The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939
  • R. A. H. Robinson
The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939. By Helen Graham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-45314-3. Maps. Photographs. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 472. $70.00.

Dr. Helen Graham won her scholarly spurs with her well-researched study Socialism and War: The Spanish Socialist Party in Power and Crisis, 1936-1939 (1991). In the book under review here, she has broadened out her subject to cover the complex political history of the whole Republican side during the thirty-four event-packed months of civil war. Archival sources in Madrid and London and research into Spanish newspapers are blended into a rich mixture of memoirs and up-to-date secondary sources to produce a chronologically organized and, for all its use of detail, lucid analytical account. Source notes, often including other snippets, are provided at the bottom of the page in reader-friendly fashion. In the Preface the author explains that her book is concerned with the reasons for the Republic's defeat. She states that its two central arguments are that the wartime responses of the various actors on the Spanish left can only be understood in relation to their experiences in the prewar years and that "the overarching influence that shaped the evolution of the Republic between 1936 and 1939 was the war itself" (p. xi). Surprisingly, she goes on to claim that "existing analyses" (p. xi) have relegated the war to the background of the [End Page 985] politics, yet the standard works on the Civil War by Hugh Thomas and Raymond Carr (both listed in her bibliography) are little different in their emphases to her own. She also blames the Anglo-French Non-Intervention policy for the Republican side's difficulties. However, from her own account it is difficult to see how aid from these quarters could have been put to good use in the crucial first ten months of the conflict, given the anarchic political and military situation behind the Republican lines which her own account of this period properly reflects.

Dr. Graham's first two chapters examine uneven development in Spain between 1898 and 1931, which she argues explains the fractured nature of left-wing organisation, with rivalries between Republicans, Socialists, Anarcho-Syndicalists and Communists, and the unstable politics of the Republic from 1931 to 1936. She ably threads her way through the complexities, but her omission of full consideration of the revolt of October 1934, a leftist pre-emptive strike against a hypothetical danger which fatally undermined hopes of democratic consensus and brought that danger closer, as of the chronic public disorder between February and July 1936, will serve to bias the beginning student's sympathies before the conflict proper begins. Her main chapters on the wartime period give due prominence to all political forces on the Republican side and include a useful exposition of developments in Catalonia, with the account of the infighting of May 1937 there remarkable for being written without ritual reference to George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, which is also banished from the bibliography.

Her portrayal of the Socialist leader Francisco Largo Caballero (Republican Premier, September 1936-May 1937), of whose irresponsibility she has previously been critical, is negative—and not without reason. Her treatment of his Socialist successor, Juan Negrín, is in marked contrast. He emerges as the tragic hero, trying secretly for a compromise peace, though the details of his efforts are as yet (as the author says) not fully known, yet in public stoutly advocating resistance until March 1939 so as not to weaken the Republic's hand. It is not explained how the publication of the Thirteen Points (an opening bid for terms dressed up as "war aims") in May 1938, which had a demoralizing effect on the Republican rank and file, fits into her argument. She is dismissive of the view that Negrín was a Communist puppet and she is very sceptical throughout of conspiratorial explanations involving Communists. In this respect her book as a whole can be interpreted as a riposte to the pioneering work of the late Burnett Bolloten (last edition...

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