Un Ruso Blanco en la Divisíon Azul: Memorias de Vladimir Kovalevski ed. by Xosé M Núñez Seixas and Oleg Beyda (review)

This unusual memoir details the increasing disillusionment of an ex-White Russian officer with the Spanish Blue Division that served with Hitler’s forces on the Eastern Front. It provides a rare insight into wartime experience through the eyes of an individual who was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union but also was dismayed at the plight of the Russian population. Written in Russian, a decade after the events described and recently unearthed in the archives of the Hoover Institute, the memoir has been translated into Spanish and edited by a leading contemporary historian of Spain, Xosé Nuñez Seixas, and a Russian history specialist, Oleg Beyda, from UNSW in Canberra. The volume is framed by a substantial and erudite introduction to recent historiography of the Nazis and their foreign legions and to the role of the fascist Blue Division within Franco’s dictatorship. This is not conventional military history. Instead, Kovalevski’s reflections on his own soldierly experience, through the complex and contradictory prism of combat participation, fit within the broad genre of the cultural history of war and warfare as exemplified in the fine works of Paul Fussell or Samuel Hynes.

Vladimir Kovalevsky, an officer of the Tsarist Army, left in the great wave of emigration after the decisive Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war. He settled in the French capital, home to the largest diasporic community of Russian exiles. In inter-war Paris, the White Russian officer was a stock figure: at the wheel of a taxi, waiting on tables or, in full Cossack uniform, as the hotel doorman. These ex-military men, trained in Tsarist military academies, were profoundly out of kilter in civilian society where they concocted endless plans for a return to the glory days of Imperial Russia. In July 1936, the military uprising in Spain against the elected Republican government found strong resonance with them. Franco’s claim that he was leading a crusade against communism offered the tantalising possibility of a regrouping of the scattered White Army, which, after defeating the rojos on the Iberian Peninsula, would march eastwards and drive out the Reds from the Motherland. This powerful, if fantastical, belief was encapsulated in a popular expression (in fact also used by many leftist exile volunteers in the Spanish civil war though with a different destination) that the way back to Moscow was through Madrid. The stark reality was that Franco and his generals disdained the previous military experience and unrealisable plans of ex-Imperial Russian officers so that the 200 or so, including Kovalevsky, who were reluctantly accepted into Franco’s forces in Spain were enlisted as ordinary soldiers. And once in the field these Russian volunteers faced the continuing humiliation that most ordinary Spanish soldiers encountered at the front had never heard of Russians of any colour other than the standard red.

During World War II, Spain’s official stance was of non-belligerence; however, in June 1941, Franco despatched some 47,000 Spanish fascist volunteers, the so-called Blue Division, to join the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. It was partly a gesture of gratitude to Hitler for Nazi support during the Spanish civil war but also was intended to ensure that the Franco dictatorship could claim a part in the seemingly assured easy German victory over the Soviet armies. White Russian military organisations, in a reworking of their previous plans for the Spanish civil war, welcomed Operation Barbarossa, but any hopes of reforming a White division were dashed by Hitler’s specific prohibition of any White Russian soldiers on the Eastern Front where their own nationalist aspirations would render them unreliable.

Kovalevsky was taken on in Madrid as an interpreter in the Blue Division that was sent to join the German Army North. It very quickly became clear to him...