Spain: A Unique History (35 page)

In fact, the revolutionary wartime Republic in Spain might be called a people's republic of sorts, in so far as it was an all-leftist regime from which democratic liberals and conservatives had been excluded, but it was not the same sort of regime as the ones established in eastern Europe. In Republican Spain, Communist influence became partially hegemonic, but it was by no means completely dominant. Important areas of the government, the armed forces, and the economy always lay outside Communist control. The east European people's republics languished under total Soviet military occupation for many years, and Communists completely controlled their governments, armed forces, security forces and economies. This went well beyond the situation in Republican Spain.

The Communist influence that existed in Spain was extensive enough that it aroused mounting resentment and opposition among the other leftist parties, all the more since by the end of 1938 there seemed little chance of winning the war. Thus, paradoxically, the Spanish Civil War ended the way it had begun, with a revolt by sectors of the Republican army against the existing Republican government, alleging that the latter had succumbed to Communist domination.

Whereas thousands of Communists around the world were shocked by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, this seems to have offended Spanish Communists considerably less, angry as they were with the Western democracies for having failed to support the anti-Fascists in Spain. For the next two years, Soviet and Comintern policy was oriented against Britain and France, the enemies of Stalin's associate Hitler, who were condemned as capitalist, imperialist, and militarist. London and Paris, rather than Berlin and Moscow, were blamed for the war in Europe. This abruptly changed in June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Spanish Communists were then instructed to create a broad national front, even including conservatives, against Franco. This proved impossible, because the other leftist and republican parties remained hostile to the Communists, to the extent that during the first years after the Civil War, the Spanish Left in general were more anticommunist than leftist forces in any other Western country. Only toward the end of World War II was it possible to rebuild a general alliance against Franco in which the Communists were included.

In general, Stalin and Franco followed curiously symmetrical policies during the first half of the world war. Each began the war as technically neutral, but both were strongly tilted toward Berlin, even though Hitler's relationship with Stalin made Franco nervous and was not approved of in Madrid. What was similar was that both Stalin and Franco hoped to achieve territorial expansion in the shadow of Hitler with only limited military activities of their own. During 1939-40 Stalin occupied large areas in eastern Europe, in only one case with hard fighting, while Franco later hoped to do much the same in northwest Africa and southwestern Europe. Hitler's subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union generated intense enthusiasm in Madrid, though Franco was careful not to accompany the dispatch of the Blue Division ("División Azul," after the blue shirts of the Falangists' uniform) to the Russian front with an official declaration of war. Stalin took much the same approach. A full Spanish division fought for two years against the Red Army (while 3,000 Spanish Communists fought with the Red Army), but Stalin chose not to complicate matters further by officially declaring war on Spain. Given the enormous dimensions of combat on the eastern front, one single Spanish division was not that important.

This did not mean, however, that Stalin intended to ignore Franco. During 1936-37 he had paid close attention to events in Spain and to the Soviet intervention, though subsequently it became less of a priority for him. At Potsdam in 1945 he denounced five neutral or non-belligerent governments, which he claimed had aided Hitler — those of Spain, Turkey, Sweden, Switzerland, and Argentina — and urged the Allies to take action against them. Although the Western powers rejected military intervention, Spanish Communists initiated a guerrilla war against the Franco regime in October 1944, with an invasion from France through the Vall d'Aran. Anarchosyndicalists later participated in their own smaller insurgency, while the Communists persisted in armed action until 1952, though after 1949 this amounted to very little. The attempted insurgency, raising the specter of violent revolution once more, probably strengthened rather than weakened the Spanish regime, and at no time threatened its stability.

Stalin's animosity did not lessen during the later years of his life. Soviet contingency plans for a major war in Europe envisioned a sizable amphibious invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, but in fact the Soviet armed forces probably never had the means for such an ambitious undertaking. Relations between Madrid and Moscow only began slowly to normalize in 1956, three years after Stalin's death, when the Spanish regime was admitted to the United Nations as part of a broad international compromise. Six years later, the most intense phase of the Cold War came to an end, and relations gradually improved during the 1960s, full diplomatic relations being restored after the death of Franco.

In the 1970s the Spanish Communists, by that time largely independent of Moscow, moved toward a kind of democratic reformism. They were never able to restore an effective alliance with the Socialists beyond the municipal level, but the two main leftist parties of Spain's democratic transition agreed for a number of years on a more neutral position in the Cold War and on opposition to joining NATO, reflecting much of Spanish public opinion, seeking to avoid commitment in the international affairs of the day. At one point this brought Moscow's special commendation of Felipe González and the Socialist policy, but that also marked the final phase of the classic Spanish Left, as the Socialists soon moved toward a more pragmatic stance.

That Spain was undergoing a definitive move toward the Left-center (and Right-center) was nonetheless not so clear to the Soviet leadership during the very last years of Soviet expansionism. Following the disastrous defeat of Carrillo in the decisive Spanish elections of 1982, the Soviet government, counseled by its "Iberian specialist," Vladimir Pertsov, invested more than a little money in Spain in a vain effort to revive an orthodox Soviet-style Communist Party.
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This effort was unsuccessful, and by the end of the decade it was the Soviet Union, not capitalism or democratic Spain, that was collapsing, ending the long political relationship with Spanish Communism initiated seven decades earlier.

During the Civil War the Republicans developed a discourse that identified Italy and Germany as the real source of the conflict, which they often called an international struggle against fascism. The Nacionales, in turn, called their effort part of an international struggle against Communism. In 1938 the Negrinista slogan "Resistir es vencer" (To resist is to win) was predicated on continuing the war in Spain until it became part of a larger conflict in which Britain and France, once they were at war with Germany, would supposedly help the Republic to achieve victory. As soon as the Second World War began in Europe, Republicans in exile declared that their own war had constituted the "opening round," "first shot," or "prelude" to the greater European war. This later became the theme of several scholarly studies, such as Patricia van der Esch's
Prelude to War: The International Repercussions of the Spanish Civil War
(1951).

Franco, conversely (and much to the disgust of Hitler), officially announced the neutrality of his government in any broader European war at the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938. Though he remained close to the Axis dictators and signed agreements with them in the months between the Spanish war and the European conflict, as soon as the latter began he once more proclaimed Spain's neutrality. This changed with the imminent fall of France in June 1940, when Franco announced his regime's status of "non-belligerence," something not recognized by international law but invented less than a year earlier by Mussolini to indicate a policy in which his country would not enter the fighting yet in its sympathies and actions tilted toward Germany. "Non-belligerence" was thus a kind of pre-belligerence. From June 1940 through the spring of 1941, at least, Franco indicated that he was willing to enter the war against Great Britain on the side of Germany so long as Hitler guaranteed major economic and military assistance, and large territorial concessions — all of which Hitler refused to do. In the meantime, Franco and his associates declared on various public occasions, and also in their private conversations with Axis leaders and diplomats, that they considered the Spanish conflict the first part of the greater European war, which was its continuation. Even though Franco stopped saying such things in 1942, for a time he seemed to agree with the Republicans. Was, therefore, their common contention not correct?

In one obvious sense, the answer has to be no. The Spanish war was a clear-cut revolutionary-counterrevolutionary contest between Left and Right, with the fascist totalitarian powers supporting the Right and the Soviet totalitarian power supporting the Left. World War II, on the other hand, only began in Europe when a pan-totalitarian entente was formed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact with the aim of allowing the Soviet Union to conquer a sizable swathe of eastern Europe while Germany was left free to conquer as much of the rest of the Continent as it could. This was a complete reversal of the terms of the Spanish war.

The formula might be reversed, with the conclusion that the Spanish Revolution and the Civil War constituted the last of the revolutionary crises stemming from World War I. Just as the military characteristics and weaponry of the Spanish war sometimes resembled those of World War I as much as those of World War II, so the Spanish situation had more characteristics of a post-World War I revolutionary crisis than of a domestic crisis of the World War II era. Among these characteristics were (1) the complete breakdown of institutions, as distinct from the direct coup d'états and legalitarian impositions of authoritarianism more typical of the era of World War II; (2) the development of a full-scale revolutionary/counterrevolutionary civil war, a relatively broad phenomenon after World War I, but elsewhere unheard of during the 1930s and appearing only in Greece and Yugoslavia during and after World War II; (3) development of a typical post-World War I Red Army in the form of the Republican People's Army; (4) an extreme exacerbation of nationalism in the National zone (and in two regions of the Republican zone), again more typical of World War I and its aftermath than of World War II; (5) frequent use of World War I-style military matériel and concepts; and (6) the fact that it was not the product of any plan or initiative by the major powers, and in that sense resembled post-World War I crises more than those of World War II. Similarly, the extreme revolutionary Left both inside and outside Spain hailed the Spanish revolution as the latest and one of the greatest, if not indeed, the greatest, of the revolutionary upsurges of the post-World War I era.

It was negotiation of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, rather than the Soviet intervention in Spain, that obeyed the Soviet doctrine of promoting and profiting from the "second imperialist war," the Soviet term since the mid-1920s for the next great European war, an orientation that long antedated the rise of Hitler. According to this doctrine, the Soviet Union should not discourage war among imperialist capitalist powers so long as it could avoid involvement, for war would weaken the major capitalist states. The Soviet Union was to strengthen itself as much as possible and then be prepared to enter the war at the decisive moment to determine its final outcome in order to advance Communism. To a degree, that was the way that the Second World War worked out in the long run, but in 1935 Stalin had been so alarmed and frustrated by the threat of German aggression targeting the Soviet Union that he had turned instead to a policy of collective security, which sought cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies against Nazi Germany, reversing the Soviet position. Intervention in Spain was supposed to complement collective security, but in fact it failed to do so. Only after the failure of both that policy and of intervention was Stalin able subsequently to establish through the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the terms which were supposed to guide Soviet policy toward the next great European war.

In September 1939 the Comintern Executive Committee then dutifully launched the slogan that the new war between Germany and the Western democracies was an "imperialist war" in which Communists should not be involved (though, like Franco, to some extent they should tilt toward Germany). The new war would benefit them by hastening the day of revolution. Members of the PCE were less disturbed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact than were those in most Communist parties, for the Spanish war left them with a great sense of bitterness toward Britain and France, which they were now happy to leave to fight Germany alone. The diary of Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern secretary, for September 7, 1939, quotes Stalin as saying to him: "It wouldn't be bad if the position of the wealthier capitalist states (especially England) were undermined at Germany's hands. Hitler, not understanding and not wishing this himself, is weakening and undermining the capitalist system.... We can maneuver, support one side against the other so they can tear each other up all the better." With regard to Hitler's first victim, Poland, it was just another "fascist state," whose destruction by Germany was welcome. "The destruction of this state in the present circumstances would mean one less bourgeois fascist state! It wouldn't be bad if, as a result of the crushing of Poland, we extended the socialist system to new territories and populations."
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Later in the month a Comintern circular went out explaining that "all efforts to kindle a world revolution have so far been unsuccessful. What are the natural prerequisites of a revolution? A prolonged war, as expounded in the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. What, therefore, must the attitude of the USSR be to hasten a world revolution? To assist Germany in a sufficient degree so that she will begin a war and to take measures to insure that this war will drag on."
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