-Caveat Lector-
July 17, 2001
Deceit in Spanish Civil War
Arnold Beichman
When Gen. Emilio Mola was asked at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July
1936 which of his four
columns he expected would capture Madrid, he replied, "the fifth column." He was, of
course, referring to his
undercover rebel supporters within the capital city.
What he didn't know was that there was a sixth column in Madrid comprising
supposed supporters of the
beleaguered Spanish Republic who would in time help him and his successor, Gen.
Francisco Franco, to take
Madrid and win the war. These were Joseph Stalin's battalions, Spanish Communist Party
members, Soviet secret
police, and Comintern agents whose instructions from Stalin were fairly simple: Take
control of the war and,
of equal if not greater importance, execute all "Trotskyites."
"Trotskyite" was a catchall appellation covering all leftist opponents of
Stalinist communism and,
especially in Spain, anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists. For Stalin, beating back
Franco and his nationalist
troops was far down on his "must" list.
Such a statement about Stalinist duplicity would be rejected even today by any
good left liberal as
calumny. Understandably. Even though Stalin, like V.I. Lenin, had wiped out in the
Soviet Union anything
resembling democracy, and even though the Moscow show trials were in full swing,
Western liberals en masse
believed that the communists were the most effective champions of democracy in Spain.
"Mountains of
mendacity," was Paul Johnson's phrase describing the pro-Soviet lies that circulated
about the Spanish Civil
War. "No episode in the 1930s has been more lied about than this one."
And now at long last we have in "Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union and the
Spanish Civil War," edited by
Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov, immutable proof of what George
Orwell was reporting at
the time to skeptical audiences, namely, how Stalin had been betraying the Spanish
Republicans from day one of
the Civil War. There is documentary proof right from the Soviet archives themselves
that a concomitant of the
Spanish Civil War was a Stalin-directed war against Republican government officials,
Spanish and foreign
soldiers alike who opposed Soviet takeover of Spain.
To understand the full meaning of these telltale tidbits from the archives we
must first look back at one
of the most infamous "party line" dogmas spawned in 1931 by the Soviet dictator :
"social fascism." It was
infamous because it made Adolf Hitler inevitable. Stalin propounded the theory that
the real enemies of the
revolution were not fascists, Nazis or capitalists. No, the real enemies were
socialists, social democrats and
non-communist labor leaders and followers of the exiled, and later assassinated, Leon
Trotsky.
Stalin imposed this calamitous "party line" on the Spanish Civil War because the
Spanish Republican cause
was of secondary importance to him. Thus Largo Caballero, leader of the Republican
forces and a true democrat
who refused to follow Kremlin orders, was to Stalin a far greater enemy than Franco.
One can read the results
of the party line in the 81 documents included in this book, communications between
Soviet agents on the spot
and Soviet officials in Moscow who instructed their agents as to what Stalin wanted
done and no questions
asked. Those who asked questions were purged, imprisoned or shot.
What these documents also reveal conclusively is that the Nation magazine during
the Spanish Civil War
was itself betrayed by one of its on-the-scene correspondents, Louis Fischer. In an
8,000-word Comintern
stenogram (Document 30) he is shown to be reporting to a high Soviet intelligence
official on December 31,
1936 about supposedly unsuccessful Spanish Republican generals, proving that they
represented "a government of
traitors." Fischer, who later turned against communism, was 100 percent in the pocket
of Soviet intelligence
throughout the war while filing dispatches to the Nation.
In all the post-Soviet archival revelations the documents cited here are among
the most meaningful
because the Spanish Civil War was also a "good" war of the intellectuals. It came at a
time of the emergence
of the Kremlin-run Popular Front and the recruitment of some intellectuals as Soviet
spies in Britain, the
United States, Canada and France. Spain in 1936 became the symbol of the resistance to
fascism. It is sad to
read these Soviet archives and read the words of a Soviet agent to the Comintern's
Georgi Dimitrov: "The war
cannot end successfully if the Communist Party does not take power in its own hands."
It is even sadder to note that while some 31,000 men volunteered for the
International Brigades, only
10,000 remained as of August, 1938 (Document 74). So many gave up their lives for
nothing. And it surely
became nothing when Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed their "non-aggression" pact
in August, 1939.
Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The
Washington Times.
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