Clash of totalitarianisms
The historian Antony Beevor has a long and fascinating review in this week’s Times Literary Supplement of two books on the Soviet Union’s role in the Spanish Civil War. The standard liberal anti-Communist view, much influenced by George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, stresses the parasitic and brutal character of Stalin’s intervention on the Republican side. Having examined the Soviet archives himself on this subject, Beevor goes much further:
Professor [Stanley] Payne’s book [The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism, 2004] is a lucid and important reassessment of the great myth that the Spanish struggle was one of “democracy versus fascism”. Payne comprehensively destroys the liberal Left’s version of events, which has maintained, even beyond the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991, that the Republican side was “merely the advanced form of the ‘bourgeois democratic republic’”. “Though it bore no relation to liberal democracy,” he writes, “it would be incessantly presented as such not merely by the Comintern’s propaganda but later by that of the reorganized Republican government and indeed by most of its partisans throughout the Civil War and for decades beyond. The myth of ‘Republican democracy’ would always lie at the core of the enduring myth of the Republic.”
The myth resides both in an underestimation of the Comintern’s direction of the Republican cause and in a severe mischaracterisation of the non-Communist Left. Beevor observes:
The Spanish Socialists were incomparably more aggressive in their rhetoric than their counterparts in France or Britain. The PSOE newspaper, El Socialista, declared: “Harmony? No! Class War! Hatred of the criminal bourgeoisie to the death!”. It was not just the Right which equated the Spanish Socialists with Bolshevism. Largo Caballero boasted that “the difference between [the Communists] and us is no more than words”, and later revelled in his nickname “The Spanish Lenin”. In January 1934, the Socialist Party issued a programme demanding nationalization of the land; the dissolution of all religious orders, with seizure of their property; dissolution of the Army, to be replaced by a democratic militia; and the dissolution of the Guardia Civil. In marked contrast to Germany and Italy, political violence in the street and workplace came almost entirely from the Left. The Right did not start to retaliate until early 1936, by which time the authority of the parliamentary system had been destroyed. The great and perhaps unanswerable question for historians is whether the leaders of the Left were forcing their followers onto a dangerous path for their own glorification, or whether they simply were intoxicated by their own revolutionary rhetoric.
Beevor does not shirk from judging where prime responsibility for this modern Spanish Tragedy lay:
The most important aspect of Stanley Payne’s book, however, is still the chilling reminder that many left-wing leaders had welcomed the prospect of civil war. They had deluded themselves that their conflict would lead to a much more rapid victory for the revolution than the Russian Civil War, purely because they assumed that they would have international support. Were they oblivious to the appalling suffering of the conflict, or was it the irresponsibility of revolutionary obsession? It was, in any case, a terrifying miscalculation which led to a fundamental dishonesty. The conflict in Spain was never a choice between liberal democracy and fascism, as both these books show. There were only two probable outcomes: a Stalinist dictatorship which had succeeded in crushing its rival allies on the Left, or the cruel regime – reactionary, military and clerical with merely superficial fascist trappings – which the victorious Franco managed to assemble. The cry of freedom, to say nothing of the sacrifice of those who took part, has never been so shamelessly betrayed. Truth was indeed the first casualty.
Beevor’s argument, following the research of Payne (who has written earlier works on the Franco dictatorship, fascism, and clericalism), threatens some hardy romantic assumptions held even among, as I say, us traditional liberal anti-Communists.
We know from the Soviet archives the extent of Stalin’s control of the Republican cause, as well as his embezzlement of it and his suppression of its non-Communist elements. (The 42,000-stong International Brigade was under the command not of a Canadian volunteer, as was the official story, but of a Soviet Commissar, Manfred Stern.) But it’s always been tempting to try to rescue the historical reputation of the Republican cause by maintaining – heavens, I’ve argued it myself – that British and French support for it in 1936 might have preserved it from becoming the creature of Stalin. That is not correct, argues Beevor (emphasis added):
There is nothing in any recent book on the subject to soften the cold brutality of the Nationalists… But more than enough has emerged to confirm that all those who went to fight on behalf of the Republic in the cause of freedom were completely duped.
In his review, Beevor doesn’t raise the question of how significant the outcome of the Spanish Civil War was for WWII, but there is a plausible argument (the historian Robert Skidelsky makes it in his collection Interests and Obsessions) that just about everyone overstated it. Franco set himself on keeping out of the War; his was a vicious, clerical-reactionary despotism with regionally-circumscribed significance. Conversely, a Republican victory would, as Beevor suggests, probably have been an outpost of Stalin’s foreign policy – which was far from being an anti-fascist force, and was determinedly expansionist.
The European democracies have received, with overwhelmingly good reason, much obloquy for their failure to take effective measures against fascism in the 1930s. But one of the most frequently-cited charges – the abandonment of Spanish Republican democracy – has served principally to deflect genuine historical accountability.
Only once the war was unwinnable did Stalin loosen his grip on the Spanish Republican cause, which – contrary to a simplistic explanation merely of Stalinist betrayal - itself had long since abandoned democracy. Even the reputable elements of that cause were useless so far as an effective opposition to European fascism was concerned. (As late as March 1939, George Orwell was urging a revolt against war with Germany. The revolt would “form itself into two sections, that of the dissident lefts like ourselves, and that of the fascists, this time the idealistic Hitler-fascists, in England more or less represented by [Sir Oswald] Mosley. I don’t know whether Mosley will have the sense and guts to stick out against war with Germany, he might decide to cash in on the patriotism business, but in that case something else will take his place” – letter to the art critic Herbert Read, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1 eds. Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, 1968, p. 425.)
