For several generations of scholars, few problems in modern history were quite as elusive as Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War. This was a consequence, on the one hand, of the inaccessibility of official documents in both Spain and the then Soviet Union, and, on the other, of the highly tendentious nature of the topic, politicized like few others throughout the Cold War. Across the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, the source base available to historians working in this hitherto inaccessible field expanded exponentially, and a small coterie of scholars endeavoured to not only revise a multitude of erroneous conclusions, but indeed to tell the story of Soviet aid to the Republic from scratch, using, for the first time, empirical evidence.
Josep Puigsech Farràs, an associate professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has treated ancillary questions to Soviet–Spanish relations in two previous monographs. His first book, Nosaltres, els comunistes Catalans [We, the Catalan Communists] (Vic, 2001), was an in-depth analysis of relations between the Comintern and the Catalan socialist party, the PSUC. His second major publication, Entre Franco y Stalin [Between Franco and Stalin] (Barcelona, 2009), continued the same narrative through the decade of the 1940s, during which time Catalan communists faced the unenviable dilemma of having to deal not only with their antagonist Franco but also with the oppressive counterpart of Stalinism. Puigsech has now produced a meticulously researched and adroitly argued study whose focus is the Soviet consulate in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. This is the first book to appear in any language on the consulate in the Catalan capital, and it reveals the depth of the continued potential for revising outdated but nevertheless reigning historiographical motifs.
Puigsech’s starting point is the long-held assumption, reiterated in innumerable books and articles dating from as early as 1938, that it was through the Barcelona consulate that Stalin attempted to exercise military and ideological control over both the Generalitat (the Catalan regional government) and, more broadly, the whole of republican Spain. The author convincingly argues that this paradigm – for which he provides ample evidence from the historiography – is aptly summarized as the “Kremlin legend”. Against this narrative, perpetuated later under the Cold War, the author is dismantling a conception of the Soviet role in the Spanish Civil War that survives in the recent work of leading historians, including Pio Moa and Stanley G. Payne. Also in Spain Betrayed, the document collection edited by Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck, and Grigory Sevostianov (New Haven, CT, 2001), it was forcefully argued that the Soviet consul Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko succeeded in influencing, if not shaping, political and military developments in Catalonia. Further, the authors of that highly problematic work claimed that through his diplomats and military advisors, Stalin was determined to make Spain a Soviet possession, comparable to the post-1945 east European people’s republics, taking over and running the Spanish economy, government, and armed forces. For Puigsech, the “Kremlin legend” implies Soviet control in both the political and military spheres. Looking through the lens of the Soviet consulate of Barcelona, the author demonstrates that Moscow never achieved dominance, nor even undue influence, in either axis, and that furthermore, the Kremlin neither sought nor desired such dominance in Spain.
Where the first component of the myth is concerned, it is certainly the case that the peculiar circumstances of the internationalization of the Spanish Civil War caused many observers to reflexively conclude, without evidence, that Moscow’s position vis-à-vis the republic insured Stalin a great degree of military, and by extension ideological, control. The Soviets entered the war only after the fascist states were deeply entrenched on the side of Franco, and after the Western democracies had signalled conclusively that they would not intervene to save the republic. Thus, Madrid had little choice but to appeal to Moscow and eventually accept Soviet assistance, which began to arrive in mid-October 1936. That support, which included the most advanced Soviet fighters and armour, as well as pilots, tankers, technicians, interpreters and military advisors, was instrumental in saving Madrid, in early November of that year, from an unrelenting assault of the Franco troops. Yet Puigsech argues that this military support, however essential to staving off defeat, came with surprisingly few strings attached, and resulted in no loss of independence on the part of the republican command. That said, the author acknowledges and indeed fleshes out Soviet policy directives that forbade arms deliveries to anarchist units operating independently of Madrid or the Generalitat. But at least the Barcelona consulate had virtually no influence on Soviet military operations in Spain, which were centred on the advisory structure and the military attaché stationed in the Madrid embassy.
In Barcelona, as in Madrid, Soviet diplomats were little interested in hijacking republican control of the armed forces. Yet both Antonov-Ovseenko and Marcel Rosenberg, the first Soviet ambassador, were keen to advise that Soviet-supplied resources were exploited as far as possible towards the goal of winning the war. The consul understood his orders from Moscow to include pressing the Generalitat to prioritize within the military the introduction and maintenance of rationalization, discipline, and structural, hierarchal order. The republican war effort, from the start of the conflict, was incorporated into the broader Soviet strategy of defeating the advance of fascism across Europe. While the Kremlin did everything possible to minimize any impression that Soviet military aid translated into ideological conformity, Moscow’s representatives in Spain advocated strengthening the historical ties with Britain and France, and supporting liberal democracy within the republic, at the expense of revolutionary aspirations, anarchism, or syndicalism. At the same time, the consul was charged with reviving and restoring the institutions and enterprises which had been collectivized, as well as establishing normal commercial relations between Barcelona and Moscow.
According to Puigsech, Stalin’s diplomats tried to avoid getting involved in the kaleidoscopic politics of republican Spain. The Kremlin’s non-intervention in Spanish politics has one significant exception, however: the support for repressing the POUM during the May Days of 1937. That process became entangled with the broader, international enforcement of Stalinist orthodoxy that resulted in the liquidation of those accused of Trotskyism, including in Catalonia. Yet that episode was less characteristic of consular attitudes than Soviet detractors have so often claimed, and, more to the point, it was understood by the Kremlin as relating to an internal Soviet problem. More often, the consulate’s position was, for instance, one of supporting cooperation between the central government and the Generalitat, and even nurturing and maintaining relations with the anarchist (FAI-CNT) leadership.
Puigsech is an excellent research historian, but he is also a story-teller who occasionally betrays sympathy for his principal protagonist, the old Bolshevik, Antonov-Ovseenko, a leading figure in the storming of the Winter Palace. The historiography has never been kind to Stalin’s diplomats in Spain, so often accused of meddling in republican internal affairs before being recalled to Moscow and eventually becoming victims of the purges. Puigsech brings the consul to life, presenting his arrival in Barcelona in autumn 1936 in great detail, and using a plethora of arcane sources to describe the activities of Antonov-Ovseenko and Sofia, his young wife, in the Catalan capital. Most poignant is the author’s account of the consul’s recall and his final meeting with Stalin, during which groundless accusations of insubordination and conspiracy with fascists were levelled against him. The couple’s subsequent trial and execution in early February 1938 were the result, not of invented misdeeds in Spain, but a consequence of the purges within the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) completely independent of the war in Spain. The fate of the consul’s surviving son, Anton, his difficult trajectory and tireless defence of his late father, including the publication of a little-known memoir, is skilfully incorporated into the narrative.
Informing this highly original and important study is a singularly impressive depth of research that draws upon declassified documentation in the Russian Federation and Spanish national and regional holdings, as well as British archival sources and an exhaustive traversal of the contemporary press in multiple languages. The Russian archives consulted include the former party archive, now the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), and the military, state, and foreign affairs archives. Missing from this study, lamentably, is today’s presidential archive, parts of which are now declassified and available, and which may have shed additional light on the role of the consulate in the Spanish Civil War. In terms of secondary studies, Puigsech demonstrates due mastery, and the bibliography is as up-to-date as one may reasonably expect; the most recent literature in Russian, Spanish, Catalan, French, and English is represented. The author is especially adept in his use of Angel Viñas, whose tetralogy of works on the Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War (2006–2009) may be considered the definitive culmination of scholarly revision of the field. Yet Puigsech demonstrates that Viñas’s studies have only hinted at the complexities of the role of the Barcelona consulate, finally addressed in this excellent, indispensable monograph.
