Marlaud
07-17-2004, 06:44 PM
Review of
SPANISH FRONT WRITERS ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Edited by Valentine Cunningham
Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
388 pp.
VOICES OF TYRANNY: WRITING OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Edited by John Miller
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986
231 pp.
by Stanley G. Payne
After half a century, the Spanish Civil War remains the favorite lost cause of twentieth century intelligentsia. None of the subsequent developments of greater moment such as World War II or the Cold War or detailed revelations concerning the politics and atrocities of the wartime Spanish Republic have served to diminish overmuch the luster of the Republican cause for leftist intelligentsia, particularly. The attractiveness of that cause stemmed first of all from the particular historical circumstances of the years 1936 to 1938, when leftist and liberal forces were engaged in armed combat with rightists and fascists only in Spain, while appeasement became the order of the day elsewhere. The Spanish war thus polarized the political consciousness of the generation of the 1930s, who held it to be a true contest of principles, an international ideological civil war, to a much greater degree than the standard clash of rival egotisms between nations.
The propaganda themes generated by the wartime Republic proved ideal for attracting the intelligentsia. No other conflict has been able at one and the same time to project myths and slogans of "fascism against democracy," "elected parliamentary government against military dictatorship," "free popular participation against elite domination," "revolution versus reaction," "socialism against capitalism," "anarchism versus controlled organization," or "equality against social domination." That some of these propositions tended to be mutually contradictory is not relevant, nor is the confusion among the Republic's supporters as to whether they were applauding "democracy" (constitutional, legalistic, even "middle class") or "revolution" (violent, authoritarian, and "worker" or "peasant").
The Republican cause could never be ultimately discredited, because, unlike other major revolutionary enterprises of this century, it failed. Whereas the major revolutionary victors of our era normally communist regimes have, once in power, blackened their reputations through mass murder, the routinization of tyranny, and economic incompetence, the wartime Spanish Republic was forever spared such enduring ignominy and will always remain in the eyes of its admirers a fair maiden without wrinkle or tarnish, struck down in the flower of youth, forever inaccessible to the ravages of age or decay.
The past year, fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War has produced a number of commemorative publications by supporters and nostalgics, and the two new anthologies edited by Cunningham and Miller both present cross-sections of the writing either from or about the war by a sizable number of major literary figures of the time. There is no evidence of any intention to enlighten by means of factual study or any pretense at objective analysis, the aim in both cases being rather to provide broad and judicious samplings of the way the war was written about by leading esthetic personalities. Of the two anthologies, that prepared by Cunningham is the fuller and more comprehensive. It will stand as one of the most representative anthologies of writing about the Spanish war by literary figures.
Both collections are composed primarily of excerpts and short articles, stories and poems from British and American writers, though a very few French and German authors are included. Spanish writers are generally ignored, just as the real issues of the war in Spain itself were generally ignored both by the foreign esthetes and the anthologists. The authors included are overwhelmingly leftist in sympathy, though the reader will find brief pieces by Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell, and statements by neutralists such as T.S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh, particularly in the Cunningham anthology. In general, these brief pieces and excerpts are undistinguished for their strictly literary quality, though there are individual exceptions in the personal recollections of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, and in a number of the poems.
These writings are useful for the political history of the liberal and leftist intelligentsia, but will tell the reader very little that is either accurate or reliable about the Spanish war itself. An understanding of that conflict cannot be gained by looking at it through the rose (or other) colored glasses of politically committed writers, but only by looking at it in its own political and historical terms.
The Civil War within the Spanish Context
The mythos of the Spanish war lives on in part because many of the cliches and generalizations about it, though partly phony, are also at least half-truths. Though the conflict was not in general a struggle between "democracy and fascism," there was at least a little residual democracy among the ideals of a minority of participants in the Republican revolutionary coalition, whereas the fascist minority on Franco's side was given official status. Though the conflict was not merely one between "Christianity and atheism," as Franco's supporters claimed, the Nationalist cause soon based itself on a massive neo-Catholic revival, while the Republicans carried out the most massive and bloody persecution of a Christian church anywhere in the contemporary world outside communist countries. Though the war was not merely a confrontation of "the people" against "the elite," since there was much enthusiastic popular volunteering on both sides, massive popular mobilization was indeed carried out by the Republican forces in certain regions, while most of the upper classes were found on Franco's side. Though the struggle was by no means merely a crusade against "fascism" or "Nazism" nor the "Opening round of World War II," Mussolini and Hitler did provide crucial assistance to Franco, and his victory did in some ways encourage Axis expansionism and the outbreak of the European war. Similarly, Franco's cause was not merely a "crusade against communism and the Soviet Union," but the Soviet Union did provide not merely the primary military support and also key military leadership for the wartime Republic, while the Communist Party emerged as a hegemonic force and endeavored to essay the new Soviet tactic of the People's Republic, though with only partial success.
The modern era has been filled with civil wars, but the Spanish struggle was unique in being the only one to take place in a west European country. It provided the only instance in twentieth century Europe or the world in which an organized and developed modern polity completely collapsed, breaking down into a full-scale civil war without suffering the trauma of defeat in foreign war or the impact of foreign invasion. The Spanish system collapsed during a time of considerable stress-the depression decade of the 30s but one in which Europe was still at peace and Spain itself was involved in no international complications whatever. One of the primary puzzles of the Spanish war, therefore, has to do with its origins, and the reasons for the internal implosion and political breakdown of the Republic.
The simple answer, of course, is to say that Spain suffered a basic contradiction between a backward southern and eastern European kind of social and economic structure and the advanced political and cultural institutions prematurely introduced by its modernizing elites. By 1931, however, there was reason to hope that the incongruity between these various dimensions was being overcome. In that year, Spain had made the transition to a new democratic Republican polity in peaceful fashion, and with every evidence of civic maturity. Though still an agrarian and industrially undeveloped country, the country had undergone a rapid process of partial industrialization and urbanization during the 1920s that, at least temporarily, seemed to be accelerating its adjustment to modern west European norms.
In retrospect, however, it is not difficult to conclude that the Republican leadership overloaded the agenda of reformism by trying to solve too many of the country's major modernization problems concurrently. There is a limit to the number of conflict areas that any polity can confront. In addition, there were social and economic pressures of the world depression, which affected Spain.
It is easy to see that Marx's forecast of advanced industrial societies being the ones most prone to revolution is incorrect, for the likelihood of breakdown and revolution is greater in societies in the early or early middle stages of industrial development. During the 1920s, Spain began to enter an early middle phase of modernization that encouraged mass mobilization and rising expectations among workers, though the productive system was still too backward to increase real income very much.
This structural problem may be considered a fundamental factor in the increasing left right polarization, which was further encouraged by an electoral system that rejected proportionality while rewarding large blocs. Moreover, international influences reflected the growth of political radicalism in other parts of Europe. The spread of fascism, communism, and rightist authoritarianism elsewhere had a major negative impact on political imaginations in Spain, not so much in encouraging their counterparts there (though that certainly took place), as in stimulating mounting fear of "fascism" or "communism," even though the Spanish fascist and communist organizations were actually weak.
The civil war that broke out in July 1936 was primarily a evolutionary / counterrevolutionary struggle, somewhat similar to other revolutionary / counterrevolutionary civil wars that had occurred earlier in Russia, Hungary, and the Baltic area, or later in Greece, Yugoslavia, and parts of east Asia. Neither fascism, democracy, nor communism as such were originally very much at issue. What remained of the democratic Republican polity generally collapsed even in the erstwhile "Republican" zone, to be replaced by a pluralist confederation of all the Spanish leftist groups. In the opposing "Nationalist" zone, a similarly eclectic coalition ranging from the right-center to the far right was led by an ad hoc military - junta, which had unleashed the conflict, and after October 1, 1936, would be headed by Francisco Franco as commander in-chief.
The Spanish revolution was relatively unique among twentieth century revolutions because it was by far the most pluralistic. It was not dominated by a single hegemonic force, such as the Communist Party. There were four different revolutionary movements in Spain, the largest being the anarchosyndicalists (CNT) and these socialists, with communists coming in a poor third. Only in Spain did revolutionary anarchosyndicalism become a major force, providing the only significant example of anarchist revolutionary praxis.
This very pluralism provides one of the major keys to the defeat of the Republican cause, for unity proved difficult. Not merely was it necessary to bring together four distinct revolutionary movements, but also to combine them with the Republican middle-class left which basically did not support socioeconomic revolution-and with regional nationalists in Catalonia and the Basque country as well.
The would-be hegemonic force that emerged on the Republican side was the Spanish Communist Party, suddenly catapulted to prominence in 1937 for two fundamental reasons. One was that no other revolutionary party or movement concentrated so thoroughly on military strength, the question of unity, and the waging of the war, as did the communists. The second was that, given the embargo imposed by the Western powers, the Soviet Union became the primary source of military supplies and assistance to the Republican forces, a situation that it exploited ruthlessly to expand communist political and economic power. Yet, though the Spanish Communist Party became what might most precisely be called a "semi-hegemonic" force under the win the war government of Prime Minister Juan Negrin from 1937 to 1939, the Republican coalition never became simply a communist regime, as its detractors of ten claimed. Though the Spanish communists themselves asserted after 1945 that the wartime Republican government had constituted the first new "People's Republic" analogous to the Soviet-dominated regimes of eastern Europe, this was at most a half-truth.
The Republican zone always remained pluralistic, and at the end, a revolt led largely by anarchists and socialists overthrew the communist-dominated government of Negrin. Ironically, the Civil War ended the way it began, with a portion of the erstwhile Republican Army rebelling against the established Republican government on the charge that it was leading to complete communist domination.
The Military Dimension
Another anomaly found in attitudes toward the Spanish war is that military affairs-always the ultimately decisive aspect of any war-have received little attention. This has generally been due to the tendency to interpret the struggle in terms of ideological politics and international power relations. Soon after the war began, each side began to charge that the other reflected little more than a conspiracy manipulated by foreign interests. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy all made major contributions to the struggle.
Of the three foreign dictators who intervened, Mussolini became the most committed, determined to foster the triumph of another anti-leftist dictatorship in the Mediterranean. Hitler was the least committed, his primary interest being to use the Spanish arena to divert international attention from events in central Europe. Stalin hoped that a militarily stronger Republic would alter the European strategic situation in favor of the Soviet Union both politically and militarily. Once it became clear that this effort was not likely to succeed, Soviet assistance began to be cut back, beginning in the autumn of 1937.
All told, the balance of foreign interventions slightly favored the nationalists, but only after the autumn of 1937. During the crucial first year of the war, the Republicans enjoyed superiority in both manpower and materiel. Neither Hitler nor Stalin committed significant military manpower to Spain. The Comintern organized 40,000 or more volunteers for the famed International Brigades. At one point in 1937, Mussolini placed 70,000 Italian troops in Spain, but that number was soon cut back. Moreover, the Nationalists recruited nearly 70, 000 men in Spanish Morocco and eventually obtained about 20,000 Portuguese volunteers, by 1938 building a decisive edge in both trained manpower and equipment.
During World War II much was made of the Spanish war as a training ground for advanced new techniques, particularly on the part of Germany. In f act, since direct German forces were never committed on the ground, there was no opportunity to test blitzkrieg-armored tactics in Spain. The only significant lessons derived from the Spanish war were gained by the 90 planes Condor Legion, the German air detachment in Spain, which did perfect new techniques of tactical air-to-ground support and fighter tactics. Other powers, particularly the Soviet Union and Italy, seemed to draw precisely the wrong lessons from Spain. Defeat of Italian units by heavy Soviet equipment at Guadalajara in 1937 had no effect in prompting reassessment of the Italian military's obsolescent preparations for war, while experience in Spain merely seems to have confirmed Soviet commanders in their tactics of dispersal of armor and timid group aerial strategy that were to prove so disastrous in 1941.
The Spanish war immediately gained a grisly and to some extent well-deserved reputation for mass political executions, yet it is important to keep this aspect in perspective, as well. Revolutionary / counterrevolutionary civil wars of the twentieth century have usually been attended by mass executions in all parts of the world, due to the intense apocalyptic polarization, which has accompanied them. Most estimates made by partisans of each side in Spain concerning the number of killings carried out by their enemies were in fact wildly exaggerated. The most sober research indicates that both sides executed somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 erstwhile opponents the Republicans somewhat more, and the Nationalists a trifle less. To this must be added approximately 30,000 executions carried out by the Franco regime in the first year after the war ended. This is a horrible set of statistics, yet not remarkable compared with mass political executions elsewhere. The percentage of non-military deaths was considerably greater in the Finnish civil war of 1917-1918. The main difference in the Spanish case was that this constituted the first and only example of mass executions in a Western country under conditions of major international publicity.
As twentieth-century wars have gone, the Spanish conflict was not particularly lethal. The long-standing myth of "a million dead" has now been reduced by careful research to fewer than 300,000 unnatural or excess deaths directly attributable to the war while it lasted. Neither side possessed the most massive or sophisticated firepower, and it was not a war of frontal assaults, but of movement. Military combat deaths scarcely exceeded 150,000 for both sides combined, and the total cost was a fraction over 1 percent of Spain's population of 25 million. Moreover, even the toll of emigration has been exaggerated, for most émigrés of 1938-1939 soon returned, though the emigration took a heavy toll of the intellectual and cultural elite.
Franco's Victory
Franco's military success as Generalissimo was not founded on any special charisma or intellectual or strategic gifts. He was above all an organizer of victory, relying on a corps of professional officers and foreign technical assistance to build an army that proved militarily more cohesive and efficient than its Republican counterpart. By contrast, the failure of the Republican People's Army lay not in spirit or courage, or at first in materiel and weaponry, but in leadership and technical organization. The professional officers purged by the revolution were never adequately replaced by new cadres, and the adoption of the Soviet system of military commissars proved an inadequate supplement.
If the main inspiration for the Republicans was the ideals of the revolution, the principal morale booster on the Nationalist side was the power of religion, in the form of a revived popular Catholicism. Revolutionary terror in the Republican zone unleashed the most serious persecution suffered by the Catholic Church in modern times, resulting in the execution of nearly 7,000 clergy, but the neotraditionalist religious and cultural revival in the Nationalist zone seemed to prove the truth of the old adage about the blood of the martyrs. The effect in Nationalist Spain by the end of the war in 1939 was not to produce a new fascism" so much as the most remarkable neotraditionalist religious and cultural revival experienced by any Western country in the twentieth century.
For Spain the Nationalist victory marked a conscious effort to reverse the cultural and political trends of modern Spanish history, installing a religious and cultural neotraditionalism that harked back to the seventeenth century. This produced a kind of Indian summer for traditionalist Spain under the Franco regime in the 1940s and 1950s, until the latter reversed some of its own priorities in order to encourage accelerated modernization.
The Real Revolution and the Democratization of Spain
The real revolution - that is, the revolution of modernization, education, and economic prosperity - was achieved by the developmental explosion in the last two decades of the long-lived Franco government. By the time the Nationalist dictator finally died in 1975, it had become clear that a modern urban industrial society, characterized by consumerism and materialist culture, had totally eroded the foundations of the conservative, rural Catholic society that had carried him to victory in the Civil War. While the internal contradictions of the Republican forces made it impossible for them to win the Civil War, the neotraditionalist culture of Francoism proved unable to cope with the contradictions created by the almost unwitting success of Franco's own develop mentalist policies. Franco himself may thus be seen as the last great historical avatar of traditionalist Spain, the very end of an immensely long historical era that stretched back into the Middle Ages. With his passing, the ultimate political victory went to the more moderate of his former adversaries. The experience of the Civil War itself has been one of the major factors in the triumph of democracy in Spain under the new constitutional monarchy of the past decade, for the new political forces bolstered by a largely prosperous, educated, and more sophisticated citizenry have vehemently eschewed the radical polarization of their forefathers. In the Spain of 1986, new parliamentary elections have not been fought over polarized extremes, as they were fifty years ago, but over the favors of the large and moderate middle sectors that dominate Spain's new society and political system. In the longer perspective, it has been a hard fought struggle with a relatively happy ending.
The Spanish Civil War drew proportionately more commitment from artists and writers than any other conflict of the century, though most were poorly informed about the real issues and terms of the conflict in Spain. The manifold slogans and cliches about the Spanish war are no more than half-truths at best, given the extreme complication and contradiction of political relations on both sides. It was, paradoxically, the counterrevolutionary Franco regime that carried out the "real revolution" after 1950, leaving Spain in a condition to develop a viable democracy.
SPANISH FRONT WRITERS ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Edited by Valentine Cunningham
Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
388 pp.
VOICES OF TYRANNY: WRITING OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Edited by John Miller
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986
231 pp.
by Stanley G. Payne
After half a century, the Spanish Civil War remains the favorite lost cause of twentieth century intelligentsia. None of the subsequent developments of greater moment such as World War II or the Cold War or detailed revelations concerning the politics and atrocities of the wartime Spanish Republic have served to diminish overmuch the luster of the Republican cause for leftist intelligentsia, particularly. The attractiveness of that cause stemmed first of all from the particular historical circumstances of the years 1936 to 1938, when leftist and liberal forces were engaged in armed combat with rightists and fascists only in Spain, while appeasement became the order of the day elsewhere. The Spanish war thus polarized the political consciousness of the generation of the 1930s, who held it to be a true contest of principles, an international ideological civil war, to a much greater degree than the standard clash of rival egotisms between nations.
The propaganda themes generated by the wartime Republic proved ideal for attracting the intelligentsia. No other conflict has been able at one and the same time to project myths and slogans of "fascism against democracy," "elected parliamentary government against military dictatorship," "free popular participation against elite domination," "revolution versus reaction," "socialism against capitalism," "anarchism versus controlled organization," or "equality against social domination." That some of these propositions tended to be mutually contradictory is not relevant, nor is the confusion among the Republic's supporters as to whether they were applauding "democracy" (constitutional, legalistic, even "middle class") or "revolution" (violent, authoritarian, and "worker" or "peasant").
The Republican cause could never be ultimately discredited, because, unlike other major revolutionary enterprises of this century, it failed. Whereas the major revolutionary victors of our era normally communist regimes have, once in power, blackened their reputations through mass murder, the routinization of tyranny, and economic incompetence, the wartime Spanish Republic was forever spared such enduring ignominy and will always remain in the eyes of its admirers a fair maiden without wrinkle or tarnish, struck down in the flower of youth, forever inaccessible to the ravages of age or decay.
The past year, fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War has produced a number of commemorative publications by supporters and nostalgics, and the two new anthologies edited by Cunningham and Miller both present cross-sections of the writing either from or about the war by a sizable number of major literary figures of the time. There is no evidence of any intention to enlighten by means of factual study or any pretense at objective analysis, the aim in both cases being rather to provide broad and judicious samplings of the way the war was written about by leading esthetic personalities. Of the two anthologies, that prepared by Cunningham is the fuller and more comprehensive. It will stand as one of the most representative anthologies of writing about the Spanish war by literary figures.
Both collections are composed primarily of excerpts and short articles, stories and poems from British and American writers, though a very few French and German authors are included. Spanish writers are generally ignored, just as the real issues of the war in Spain itself were generally ignored both by the foreign esthetes and the anthologists. The authors included are overwhelmingly leftist in sympathy, though the reader will find brief pieces by Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell, and statements by neutralists such as T.S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh, particularly in the Cunningham anthology. In general, these brief pieces and excerpts are undistinguished for their strictly literary quality, though there are individual exceptions in the personal recollections of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, and in a number of the poems.
These writings are useful for the political history of the liberal and leftist intelligentsia, but will tell the reader very little that is either accurate or reliable about the Spanish war itself. An understanding of that conflict cannot be gained by looking at it through the rose (or other) colored glasses of politically committed writers, but only by looking at it in its own political and historical terms.
The Civil War within the Spanish Context
The mythos of the Spanish war lives on in part because many of the cliches and generalizations about it, though partly phony, are also at least half-truths. Though the conflict was not in general a struggle between "democracy and fascism," there was at least a little residual democracy among the ideals of a minority of participants in the Republican revolutionary coalition, whereas the fascist minority on Franco's side was given official status. Though the conflict was not merely one between "Christianity and atheism," as Franco's supporters claimed, the Nationalist cause soon based itself on a massive neo-Catholic revival, while the Republicans carried out the most massive and bloody persecution of a Christian church anywhere in the contemporary world outside communist countries. Though the war was not merely a confrontation of "the people" against "the elite," since there was much enthusiastic popular volunteering on both sides, massive popular mobilization was indeed carried out by the Republican forces in certain regions, while most of the upper classes were found on Franco's side. Though the struggle was by no means merely a crusade against "fascism" or "Nazism" nor the "Opening round of World War II," Mussolini and Hitler did provide crucial assistance to Franco, and his victory did in some ways encourage Axis expansionism and the outbreak of the European war. Similarly, Franco's cause was not merely a "crusade against communism and the Soviet Union," but the Soviet Union did provide not merely the primary military support and also key military leadership for the wartime Republic, while the Communist Party emerged as a hegemonic force and endeavored to essay the new Soviet tactic of the People's Republic, though with only partial success.
The modern era has been filled with civil wars, but the Spanish struggle was unique in being the only one to take place in a west European country. It provided the only instance in twentieth century Europe or the world in which an organized and developed modern polity completely collapsed, breaking down into a full-scale civil war without suffering the trauma of defeat in foreign war or the impact of foreign invasion. The Spanish system collapsed during a time of considerable stress-the depression decade of the 30s but one in which Europe was still at peace and Spain itself was involved in no international complications whatever. One of the primary puzzles of the Spanish war, therefore, has to do with its origins, and the reasons for the internal implosion and political breakdown of the Republic.
The simple answer, of course, is to say that Spain suffered a basic contradiction between a backward southern and eastern European kind of social and economic structure and the advanced political and cultural institutions prematurely introduced by its modernizing elites. By 1931, however, there was reason to hope that the incongruity between these various dimensions was being overcome. In that year, Spain had made the transition to a new democratic Republican polity in peaceful fashion, and with every evidence of civic maturity. Though still an agrarian and industrially undeveloped country, the country had undergone a rapid process of partial industrialization and urbanization during the 1920s that, at least temporarily, seemed to be accelerating its adjustment to modern west European norms.
In retrospect, however, it is not difficult to conclude that the Republican leadership overloaded the agenda of reformism by trying to solve too many of the country's major modernization problems concurrently. There is a limit to the number of conflict areas that any polity can confront. In addition, there were social and economic pressures of the world depression, which affected Spain.
It is easy to see that Marx's forecast of advanced industrial societies being the ones most prone to revolution is incorrect, for the likelihood of breakdown and revolution is greater in societies in the early or early middle stages of industrial development. During the 1920s, Spain began to enter an early middle phase of modernization that encouraged mass mobilization and rising expectations among workers, though the productive system was still too backward to increase real income very much.
This structural problem may be considered a fundamental factor in the increasing left right polarization, which was further encouraged by an electoral system that rejected proportionality while rewarding large blocs. Moreover, international influences reflected the growth of political radicalism in other parts of Europe. The spread of fascism, communism, and rightist authoritarianism elsewhere had a major negative impact on political imaginations in Spain, not so much in encouraging their counterparts there (though that certainly took place), as in stimulating mounting fear of "fascism" or "communism," even though the Spanish fascist and communist organizations were actually weak.
The civil war that broke out in July 1936 was primarily a evolutionary / counterrevolutionary struggle, somewhat similar to other revolutionary / counterrevolutionary civil wars that had occurred earlier in Russia, Hungary, and the Baltic area, or later in Greece, Yugoslavia, and parts of east Asia. Neither fascism, democracy, nor communism as such were originally very much at issue. What remained of the democratic Republican polity generally collapsed even in the erstwhile "Republican" zone, to be replaced by a pluralist confederation of all the Spanish leftist groups. In the opposing "Nationalist" zone, a similarly eclectic coalition ranging from the right-center to the far right was led by an ad hoc military - junta, which had unleashed the conflict, and after October 1, 1936, would be headed by Francisco Franco as commander in-chief.
The Spanish revolution was relatively unique among twentieth century revolutions because it was by far the most pluralistic. It was not dominated by a single hegemonic force, such as the Communist Party. There were four different revolutionary movements in Spain, the largest being the anarchosyndicalists (CNT) and these socialists, with communists coming in a poor third. Only in Spain did revolutionary anarchosyndicalism become a major force, providing the only significant example of anarchist revolutionary praxis.
This very pluralism provides one of the major keys to the defeat of the Republican cause, for unity proved difficult. Not merely was it necessary to bring together four distinct revolutionary movements, but also to combine them with the Republican middle-class left which basically did not support socioeconomic revolution-and with regional nationalists in Catalonia and the Basque country as well.
The would-be hegemonic force that emerged on the Republican side was the Spanish Communist Party, suddenly catapulted to prominence in 1937 for two fundamental reasons. One was that no other revolutionary party or movement concentrated so thoroughly on military strength, the question of unity, and the waging of the war, as did the communists. The second was that, given the embargo imposed by the Western powers, the Soviet Union became the primary source of military supplies and assistance to the Republican forces, a situation that it exploited ruthlessly to expand communist political and economic power. Yet, though the Spanish Communist Party became what might most precisely be called a "semi-hegemonic" force under the win the war government of Prime Minister Juan Negrin from 1937 to 1939, the Republican coalition never became simply a communist regime, as its detractors of ten claimed. Though the Spanish communists themselves asserted after 1945 that the wartime Republican government had constituted the first new "People's Republic" analogous to the Soviet-dominated regimes of eastern Europe, this was at most a half-truth.
The Republican zone always remained pluralistic, and at the end, a revolt led largely by anarchists and socialists overthrew the communist-dominated government of Negrin. Ironically, the Civil War ended the way it began, with a portion of the erstwhile Republican Army rebelling against the established Republican government on the charge that it was leading to complete communist domination.
The Military Dimension
Another anomaly found in attitudes toward the Spanish war is that military affairs-always the ultimately decisive aspect of any war-have received little attention. This has generally been due to the tendency to interpret the struggle in terms of ideological politics and international power relations. Soon after the war began, each side began to charge that the other reflected little more than a conspiracy manipulated by foreign interests. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy all made major contributions to the struggle.
Of the three foreign dictators who intervened, Mussolini became the most committed, determined to foster the triumph of another anti-leftist dictatorship in the Mediterranean. Hitler was the least committed, his primary interest being to use the Spanish arena to divert international attention from events in central Europe. Stalin hoped that a militarily stronger Republic would alter the European strategic situation in favor of the Soviet Union both politically and militarily. Once it became clear that this effort was not likely to succeed, Soviet assistance began to be cut back, beginning in the autumn of 1937.
All told, the balance of foreign interventions slightly favored the nationalists, but only after the autumn of 1937. During the crucial first year of the war, the Republicans enjoyed superiority in both manpower and materiel. Neither Hitler nor Stalin committed significant military manpower to Spain. The Comintern organized 40,000 or more volunteers for the famed International Brigades. At one point in 1937, Mussolini placed 70,000 Italian troops in Spain, but that number was soon cut back. Moreover, the Nationalists recruited nearly 70, 000 men in Spanish Morocco and eventually obtained about 20,000 Portuguese volunteers, by 1938 building a decisive edge in both trained manpower and equipment.
During World War II much was made of the Spanish war as a training ground for advanced new techniques, particularly on the part of Germany. In f act, since direct German forces were never committed on the ground, there was no opportunity to test blitzkrieg-armored tactics in Spain. The only significant lessons derived from the Spanish war were gained by the 90 planes Condor Legion, the German air detachment in Spain, which did perfect new techniques of tactical air-to-ground support and fighter tactics. Other powers, particularly the Soviet Union and Italy, seemed to draw precisely the wrong lessons from Spain. Defeat of Italian units by heavy Soviet equipment at Guadalajara in 1937 had no effect in prompting reassessment of the Italian military's obsolescent preparations for war, while experience in Spain merely seems to have confirmed Soviet commanders in their tactics of dispersal of armor and timid group aerial strategy that were to prove so disastrous in 1941.
The Spanish war immediately gained a grisly and to some extent well-deserved reputation for mass political executions, yet it is important to keep this aspect in perspective, as well. Revolutionary / counterrevolutionary civil wars of the twentieth century have usually been attended by mass executions in all parts of the world, due to the intense apocalyptic polarization, which has accompanied them. Most estimates made by partisans of each side in Spain concerning the number of killings carried out by their enemies were in fact wildly exaggerated. The most sober research indicates that both sides executed somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 erstwhile opponents the Republicans somewhat more, and the Nationalists a trifle less. To this must be added approximately 30,000 executions carried out by the Franco regime in the first year after the war ended. This is a horrible set of statistics, yet not remarkable compared with mass political executions elsewhere. The percentage of non-military deaths was considerably greater in the Finnish civil war of 1917-1918. The main difference in the Spanish case was that this constituted the first and only example of mass executions in a Western country under conditions of major international publicity.
As twentieth-century wars have gone, the Spanish conflict was not particularly lethal. The long-standing myth of "a million dead" has now been reduced by careful research to fewer than 300,000 unnatural or excess deaths directly attributable to the war while it lasted. Neither side possessed the most massive or sophisticated firepower, and it was not a war of frontal assaults, but of movement. Military combat deaths scarcely exceeded 150,000 for both sides combined, and the total cost was a fraction over 1 percent of Spain's population of 25 million. Moreover, even the toll of emigration has been exaggerated, for most émigrés of 1938-1939 soon returned, though the emigration took a heavy toll of the intellectual and cultural elite.
Franco's Victory
Franco's military success as Generalissimo was not founded on any special charisma or intellectual or strategic gifts. He was above all an organizer of victory, relying on a corps of professional officers and foreign technical assistance to build an army that proved militarily more cohesive and efficient than its Republican counterpart. By contrast, the failure of the Republican People's Army lay not in spirit or courage, or at first in materiel and weaponry, but in leadership and technical organization. The professional officers purged by the revolution were never adequately replaced by new cadres, and the adoption of the Soviet system of military commissars proved an inadequate supplement.
If the main inspiration for the Republicans was the ideals of the revolution, the principal morale booster on the Nationalist side was the power of religion, in the form of a revived popular Catholicism. Revolutionary terror in the Republican zone unleashed the most serious persecution suffered by the Catholic Church in modern times, resulting in the execution of nearly 7,000 clergy, but the neotraditionalist religious and cultural revival in the Nationalist zone seemed to prove the truth of the old adage about the blood of the martyrs. The effect in Nationalist Spain by the end of the war in 1939 was not to produce a new fascism" so much as the most remarkable neotraditionalist religious and cultural revival experienced by any Western country in the twentieth century.
For Spain the Nationalist victory marked a conscious effort to reverse the cultural and political trends of modern Spanish history, installing a religious and cultural neotraditionalism that harked back to the seventeenth century. This produced a kind of Indian summer for traditionalist Spain under the Franco regime in the 1940s and 1950s, until the latter reversed some of its own priorities in order to encourage accelerated modernization.
The Real Revolution and the Democratization of Spain
The real revolution - that is, the revolution of modernization, education, and economic prosperity - was achieved by the developmental explosion in the last two decades of the long-lived Franco government. By the time the Nationalist dictator finally died in 1975, it had become clear that a modern urban industrial society, characterized by consumerism and materialist culture, had totally eroded the foundations of the conservative, rural Catholic society that had carried him to victory in the Civil War. While the internal contradictions of the Republican forces made it impossible for them to win the Civil War, the neotraditionalist culture of Francoism proved unable to cope with the contradictions created by the almost unwitting success of Franco's own develop mentalist policies. Franco himself may thus be seen as the last great historical avatar of traditionalist Spain, the very end of an immensely long historical era that stretched back into the Middle Ages. With his passing, the ultimate political victory went to the more moderate of his former adversaries. The experience of the Civil War itself has been one of the major factors in the triumph of democracy in Spain under the new constitutional monarchy of the past decade, for the new political forces bolstered by a largely prosperous, educated, and more sophisticated citizenry have vehemently eschewed the radical polarization of their forefathers. In the Spain of 1986, new parliamentary elections have not been fought over polarized extremes, as they were fifty years ago, but over the favors of the large and moderate middle sectors that dominate Spain's new society and political system. In the longer perspective, it has been a hard fought struggle with a relatively happy ending.
The Spanish Civil War drew proportionately more commitment from artists and writers than any other conflict of the century, though most were poorly informed about the real issues and terms of the conflict in Spain. The manifold slogans and cliches about the Spanish war are no more than half-truths at best, given the extreme complication and contradiction of political relations on both sides. It was, paradoxically, the counterrevolutionary Franco regime that carried out the "real revolution" after 1950, leaving Spain in a condition to develop a viable democracy.