Stalinist Intrigue in the Spanish Civil War

I chose this week to discuss the Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War under Stalin and the short- and long-term effects that it had on the USSR's diplomatic strength. The war began on July 17, 1936, with an uprising of anti-republican generals in the Spanish army. Although the Soviets signed an international nonintervention agreement, like Germany and Italy, they ignored the agreement almost immediately and offered military and monetary support for the Republicans, who themselves ran the gamut politically from the Moscow-aligned Spanish Communist Party (PCE), the Trotskyist Workers Party for Marxist Unification (POUM), the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), and anarchist and syndicalist workers movements on the left to a variety of centrist, liberal, democratic parties, as well as some conservatives.

In intervening in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin brought to the full culmination the disastrous policy of the Comintern that had already contributed to the Nazis taking over the government in Germany three-and-a-half years earlier. This policy was initially one in which Moscow-aligned communist parties were forbidden to cooperate politically with non-communist, left-wing political parties, whom Moscow labeled "social fascists." In part because Stalin forbade Ernst Thälmann, head of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), from forming a bloc with the Social-democratic Party of Germany (SPD) following the 1930 election, in which the SPD and KPD combined won a large plurality.

After Hitler became Chancellor, Stalin changed his tune on popular fronts, at least publicly. He allowed the formation of popular fronts in Spain and France, both of which won elections in 1936 election. However, Stalin's policies continued to negatively affect the domestic politics of both countries. In France, refusal to cooperate on core labor platform ideals resulted in the disintegration of the front. In Spain, although the front operated successfully until the generals coup in July 1936, the insistence by Stalin of the deployment of political commissars in Republican military units and, more importantly, of the NKVD to eliminate the opposition to the PCE on the left were ultimately very destructive factors.[1]

Among the people to have observed just how destructive Stalin's conduct via the NKVD was during the Spanish Civil War was George Orwell, who fought in Catalonia during the war with a POUM militia. On the fall of the government of PSOE leader Francisco Largo Caballero in May 1937, Orwell wrote, "With the fall of the Caballero Government the Communists had come definitely into power, the charge of internal order had been handed over to Communist ministers, and no one doubted that they would smash their political rivals as soon as they got a quarter of a chance."[2] Orwell subsequently reported on the arrest, torture, and murder of POUM head Andreu Nin. Also important to bear in mind is that, during the Spanish Civil War, the NKVD recruited Caridad Mercader and her son Ramon, who would go on to assassinate Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.

In short, rather than contributing to the war in Spain to assure Republican victory, Stalin instead concentrating on continuing the Great Purges on foreign land, eliminating political opposition to the PCE but handing victory to Franco and the Nationalists. While it has been suggested that, under no circumstances, could the Republicans have won the war given German and Italian support of the Nationalists, Orwell was thoroughly of the opinion that the Soviets had lost the war for the Republicans through their political intrigues. I tend to agree.

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     [1] M.K. Dziewanowski, Russia in the Twentieth Century, 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003), 223-24.
     [2] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Mariner Books, 1980), 195.