The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (review)

For many decades after the Spanish Civil War, it remained difficult to write a balanced account of the conflict. Most wars produce winners and losers, and the perspective of the latter is inevitably slighted in the historiography. But in the case of Spain, the last century saw the curious spectacle of history biased mainly in favor of the losers. This was, in part, because the principal international backers of Francisco Franco's victorious forces—Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler—themselves lost the next war, and a great deal of their pariah status rubbed off on Franco. Documents from German and Italian archives that became available after World War II exposed, irrefutably, Franco's dependence on foreign fascist support. The principal backer of the losing side, the Soviet Union under Josif Stalin, by contrast, emerged victorious from the Second World War with all the prestige of a superpower. Although memoirs of participants, most famously George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, provided small glimpses of Soviet activities on the Republican side, precious little documentation about these activities was available until after 1991.

The time is ripe for a reevaluation, and Stanley Payne's The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism does not disappoint. Payne, a leading authority on fascism and Franco, masterfully synthesizes a burgeoning secondary literature on the Soviet side of the conflict, along with newly available documents from the archives of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, to flesh out a story he already knows well. Payne's book should stand as the definitive account of the Soviet intervention for years to come.

One of Payne's finer achievements here is to make sense of the political chaos of the Spanish left. To non-specialists, the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War has always been difficult to decipher, a kind of funhouse mirror refracting the ideological and political pretensions of the twentieth century into a grotesque mosaic of acronyms: PSOE, PCE, UGT, CNT, POUM, PCC, BPA, BOC, FCC, FCI. Payne breaks through the ideological fog to explain what these groups stood for, what relations (if any) they had with Moscow, how much popular support they enjoyed, and how and why they quarreled. The one thing on which all the leftist factions agreed, Payne dryly remarks, was how to label their rivals: "by 1933 everyone in Republican Spain was calling his opponents fascists" (p. 36).

Payne clearly has little patience for the traditional Spanish Civil War myth about a heroic defense of democracy against fascist aggression. The center-right government that preceded the Popular Front, Payne shows, was in fact quite lenient toward those on the left who had participated in the bloody insurrection of October 1934. Rather than excessive repression, the center-right's "failure to punish the revolutionaries" (p. 58) was the real problem. Payne demonstrates that no "strong fascist movement" existed in Spain. The elections of February 1936, he writes, were really a kind of "plebiscite on the insurrection" that had begun in Asturias in 1934 when the triumphant Popular Front side construed its victory as a mandate for violent revolution (pp. 83–84). Had the government of Manuel Azaña instead sought to uphold the constitution and "enforce the law," Payne suggests, "it might have managed to avoid the conflagration" (pp. 290–291).

Payne also demolishes what might be called the counter-myth of the right—the notion that the Republicans were simple naifs manipulated by an all-powerful Stalin. Far from being innocents, the Popular Front coalition partners all broadly cooperated in what Payne calls a "Red Terror" of "organized mass executions" (p. 117). Stalin and his agents certainly exploited the Republican cause to gain more than $500 million worth of gold as well as access to "a windfall of foreign passports," especially from American volunteers for the International Brigades, which "would make an important contribution to the success of Soviet espionage" (p. 146). But Payne argues that previous historians, such as Hugh Thomas, have greatly exaggerated...