The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The archbishop of Burgos, who justified the cruelty of the war as being ultimately less cruel because it meant a shorter conflict, was clearly wrong, both morally and logically. Neither side could be terrified into submission. The polarization of political beliefs meant that both parties felt that everything in which they believed, as well as their very existence, was at stake. This transmuted fear into desperate bravery. The war was only likely to end when a decisive lack of troops, armaments and munitions demonstrated that defeat was inescapable. This came about for the Republic after its catastrophic defeat on the Ebro.

The only possible reason for continuing the struggle would have been to achieve better surrender terms from Franco, but this was a vain hope. Negrín failed utterly with his thirteen points and there were no grounds to expect that Franco was likely to shift his position; in fact, he was bound to become even more inflexible the closer he came to victory. Any decision to fight on could lead only to a useless loss of life. An International Brigader wrote later, ‘It was all very fine for the left in Europe and America to beat their breasts and demand that the common people of Spain should fight to the last man, but once it had become apparent that the war could not be won it should have been terminated.’⁴ Whether or not an earlier surrender might have mitigated the vicious revenge of the victors is impossible to say, but it is doubtful. All one can be sure of is that it would have saved many of the tens of thousands of lives lost in the hopeless battle for Catalonia.

Little more need be said about the Franquist vengeance, a process which was frequently justified on the basis of sentences for ‘military rebellion’, a reversal of judicial logic that speaks for itself. Facts gathered so painstakingly by Spanish historians over recent years leave little further doubt about its scale or its cruelty. The only question left to answer covers the thought processes of those who perpetrated such a regime. But to speculate about the mental state of such oppressors, whether Nazi, Soviet or nationalist, is to risk assuming the dubious mantle of a long-distance psychiatrist.

The repression extended throughout the population as a whole, creating a terrible claustrophobia, exceeded only by the harshness of living conditions imposed by the regime. One of the great debates of recent years has been the degree to which Franco’s policy of autarchy and centralized financial direction laid the ground for Spain’s subsequent economic transformation. The argument for the economic policy established under Franco is very hard to fathom since it created a deadening form of state control which some commentators have compared to the Soviet satellite states of the Cold War years. In the case of Franco’s Spain, however, the degree of corruption and waste was perhaps equalled only by Ceauşescu’s Romania. The partial economic liberalization which came about in the 1960s was in many ways more a case of accident due to foreign influences than of design.

The pertinent question, however, is what would a republican victory have produced? If the People’s Army had achieved victory in, say, 1937 or 1938, what form of government would have ensued–the left-liberal administration of early 1936 or a hard-line communist regime? The accelerated collapse of the republican government in the spring and summer of 1936 and the onset of civil war, which triggered the revolutionary upheaval, followed a different path from the chaos that ensued from the First World War. Yet there was one similarity to the Russian revolution: this was the communist determination to eliminate their left-wing allies once the war had been won against the right. In September 1936, soon after his arrival, General Vladimir Goriev reported to Moscow: ‘A struggle against the anarchists is absolutely inevitable after victory over the whites. This struggle will be very severe.’⁵ André Marty, the Comintern representative, stated on 10 October, ‘After victory we will get even with them [the anarchists], all the more so since at that point we will have a strong army.’⁶ And Pravda declared on 10 December that the ‘cleaning up of Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist elements will be carried out with the same energy as in the USSR.’ As numerous reports back to Moscow made clear, the Popular Front strategy was merely a strategy ‘for the moment’. The Comintern representatives in Spain were clearly seeking communist hegemony in Spain and, even though this was not in line with Stalin’s general strategy, it is significant that no reproof or warning about this from Dimitrov appears in the communications between Moscow and Spain.