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

During the Spanish Civil War the Comintern was best known for having created the International Brigades. Although the exact origin of the idea remains uncertain, it came with the first calls for international support for the Spanish Republic–a form of solidarity, it was felt, which should have a military dimension.¹ On 3 August the Comintern approved a first resolution in general terms, no doubt waiting for a clear signal from the conspicuously silent Kremlin. Only on 18 September, after Stalin had made up his mind, did the secretariat dictate a resolution on ‘the campaign of support in the struggle of the Spanish people’, of which point No. 7 read: ‘proceed to the recruitment of volunteers with military experience from the workers of all countries, with the purpose of sending them to Spain’.²

A meeting was then held in Paris when Eugen Fried (‘Clément’) presented the instructions which he had brought from Moscow. Maurice Thorez and the other leaders of the French Communist Party were to organize the recruitment and training of volunteers destined to fight fascism in Spain. Communist Parties and organizations, such as Red Help International, Friends of the Soviet Union, Rot Front, la Confédération Générale du Travail, the Paix et Liberté movement and the various local committees to aid the Spanish Republic organized by the Soviet intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky, from The Hague, were all to play their part.³

In Spain there were already several hundred foreign volunteers. Most had just arrived in Barcelona for the People’s Olympiad when the rising took place. A number of them volunteered to form the first nucleus of the International Brigades, the centuria Thaelmann, then attached to the PSUC in Catalonia. This unit was led by Hans Beimler, a member of the central committee of the German Communist Party and a deputy in the Reichstag. After Hitler’s seizure of power, Beimler had been locked up in Dachau, from where he had managed to escape, reaching Barcelona on 5 August 1936. During the course of the whole civil war between 32,000 and 35,000 men from 53 different countries served in the ranks of the International Brigades.⁴ Another 5,000 foreigners served outside, mostly attached to the CNT or the POUM.

The main recruitment centre chosen for the International Brigades was Paris, where volunteers were organized by leaders of the French and Italian Communist Parties. André Marty, a leader of the PCF and a member of the executive committee of the Comintern, had Luigi Longo (‘Gallo’), who had been in Spain during the rising, as his second in command. Giuseppe di Vittorio (‘Nicoletti’) became head of the commissars. Another key figure was Josip Broz (‘Tito’), who was also in Paris. The Comintern claimed publicly that the International Brigades consisted of a wide group of spontaneous volunteers, democrats and anti-fascists. It denied that young communists had been ordered to Paris as part of an organized recruitment. Towards the end of the 1960s Moscow admitted that in September 1936 the Comintern had decided to infiltrate ‘volunteers with military experience to send them to fight in Spain’.⁵ Esmond Romilly, the young nephew of Winston Churchill who enlisted in the International Brigades, wrote that French communists reprimanded those who shouted ‘Vive les Soviets!’.⁶

With right-wing dictatorships forming a belt from Hamburg to Taranto, it required careful organization to bring the East Europeans to Spain. Poles in exile from their country’s military regime started to arrive in Paris, together with Hungarians fleeing from Admiral Horthy’s dictatorship and Romanians escaping from the Iron Guard. Yugoslavs avoiding the royalist police came along Tito’s ‘secret railway’. Even White Russians, hoping that service with the Brigades would allow them to return home, joined the mass of East European exiles. Most of them had a hard and painful journey before reaching their destination. ‘Often on foot, across fields and mountains, sleeping in the open, hidden in coal tenders or in the bilges of a ship, they managed to get through police control points and frontiers to reach France.’⁷ Volunteers from North America did not arrive until much later. The first detachment from the United States left New York on Christmas Day and the Lincoln Battalion saw action in the battle of the Jarama in February 1937.

The story of the International Brigades later became distorted in many ways, not simply from the propaganda motive of exaggerating their role out of all proportion to that of Spanish formations. An impression arose, especially in Great Britain and America, that they consisted of middle-class intellectuals and ideological Beau Gestes such as Ralph Fox, John Cornford, Julian Bell and Christopher Caudwell, who were all killed in action. This came about partly because the intellectual minority was newsworthy and partly because they were articulate and had ready access to publishers afterwards.