Stalin and the Spanish Civil War: Appendix A

Email this citation Appendix A: An Essay on the Sources
I. Soviet Literature on the Spanish Civil War Long neglected, derided, or outright dismissed, Russian-language publications on the Spanish Civil War constitute a surprisingly impressive corpus of documents and scholarship, one which deserves to be considered alongside Western production. On closer inspection, the development of Soviet Hispanism may be seen to mirror the same process that took place in the West. In each case, the civil war served as a catalyst for broader socio-political studies of the Iberian Peninsula, with direct eyewitnesses of and participants in the war taking a lead role in founding academic or journalistic circles devoted to researching the conflict and constructing historical narratives.	1
As with their Western counterparts, Russian researchers were latecomers to Iberian studies, having long focused more heavily on studies of Northern and Central Europe, or indeed the history of their own country. In 1931, the Soviet Union was practically a stranger to the Hispanic world, and even on the eve of the Spanish Civil War there was only marginal Russian interest in the cultural and political features of the Iberian Peninsula. The onset of the civil war quickly transformed Soviet attitudes towards Spain, and against a backdrop of public demonstrations and official support Russian-language journalistic and historical accounts devoted to Spanish affairs soon proliferated. Within the first year of the war, many small pamphlets and collections of official documents or articles had gone to press in Russia. For the balance of the war, the USSR produced a steady stream of publications related to Iberian affairs. In the intervening six decades, Russian scholars and readers experienced two additional spurts of interest in this topic: the first during the Khrushchev thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the second in the mid-1980s, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the war. 1. Bibliographies and Historiographic Studies
Soviet literature on the Spanish Civil War includes many hundreds of individual works, and numerous bibliographies have listed, compared, and contrasted this body of scholarship. The first historiographic studies appeared in the mid-1960s in historical journals and in broader, more general Soviet works on Western history. Early attempts to examine historiographic trends included brief descriptive essays by Ponomarieva, Meshcheriakov, Kandel, and Guterman.
L. V. Ponomarieva's 1962 review, Sovietskaia istoricheskaia nauka ot XX k XXII siezdii Komunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza. Istoriia stran Zapadnoi Evropy i Ameriki, ₁ includes a discussion of Soviet scholarship on the Spanish Civil War, and was one of the first comparative approaches to this material. Concentrating on the years 1956-61, Ponomarieva analyzed several dozen monographs, published document collections, memoirs, and journal and press articles. The author concluded that, during this period, the nascent field of Soviet Hispanism had made considerable strides towards a rigorous, historical approach to the problems of modern Spain, and in particular the Spanish Civil War. Ponomarieva suggested that the discipline was just then (in 1962) emerging from the era of Stalinist dogmatism and, as the documentary base of research was being expanded, plans for future investigations were now to be laid out.
A similar survey of the succeeding years, 1960-64, appears in M. T. Meshcheriakov's 1964 article, "Ispanskaia tema v rabotakh sovetskikh istorikov." ₂ In the article, Meshcheriakov, who would dominate the field of Soviet Hispanism throughout the 1960s and 1970s, examined new scholarship on Spain as well as recently published memoirs of Soviet participants in the Spanish Civil War. The author paid homage to the efforts of I. M. Maiskii, who encouraged Hispanic studies and edited or otherwise facilitated the publication of memoirs, including those of Malinovskii, Voronov, Kuznetsov, Batov, Rodimtsev, and others. Meshcheriakov noted that the study of Spain was then dominated by works devoted to the Spanish war and the Second Republic, much to the exclusion of other areas of Spanish history. Furthermore, he suggested that scholarship on the civil war was too often tendentious and overly simplified, and important aspects of the conflict were being ignored. In particular, Meshcheriakov cited the paucity of attention to the international aspects of the war and an almost total lack of analysis of the Nationalist side of the struggle. "One must not forget," the author warned, "that the 1936-1939 war in Spain was, above all, a civil war, a conflict between two sides.... It will be impossible to understand the full complexity of events occurring in Spain during the war years if research ... is organized only around the Republican camp." ₃	5
The 1966 study Istoriia zarubezhnikh stran (Bibliografiia russkikh bibliografii) contains analyses by two Soviet historians of the recent literature on the topic, including annotated summaries of memoirs and fictional accounts of the Spanish Civil War, as well as historical monographs. ₄ Another collaborative effort completed several years later reviews literature published through 1970. ₅ More significant is L. M. Iur'eva's 1973 bibliographic study, Natsionalno-revolutsionnaia voina v Ispanii i mirovaia literatura. Iur'eva attempted to analyze the literary output of Republican sympathizers throughout the world, including little-known accounts of eyewitnesses who had traveled to Spain from the USSR. ₆
In 1975, the most complete list of Soviet scholarship to that point on all areas of Spanish history appeared in the periodical Problemy ispanskoi istorii. ₇ This unannotated list, compiled by E. L. Gluzhinskaia, includes 279 Soviet articles, books, and dissertations published since 1917 on Spanish topics. The journal engaged the same author to update the list in 1984. ₈ In her second bibliography, which comprises only those publications appearing between 1975 and 1982, she cited 316 articles and books for the seven-year period, of which 166 items were devoted to the twentieth century. The author also cited an additional 62 works missed in the earlier tally. In all, Gluzhinskaia named 958 works on Spanish history produced in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1984. Though the Ezhegodnik knigi (Yearbook of USSR publications) for any given decade cites a far greater number of Soviet books on French, German, or British history, Gluzhinskaia's lists indicate that Spanish history had a sizable following in the Soviet Union, one which grew considerably in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War witnessed a renewal of Soviet interest in Spanish history. Marking the occasion, S. P. Pozharskaia's "Sovetskaia istoriografiia antifashistskoi voiny v Ispanii (1936-1939)" ₉ outlined the trends in Soviet historiography of the war in the half century since its conclusion. Pozharskaia, a specialist in Iberian history at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, traced the development of the field of Spanish studies in Russia and summarized its literary output. Beginning with the very first studies on the civil war published in Russia in the autumn of 1936, Pozharskaia leads the reader on a brisk intellectual history of an emerging discipline. The result is both broad in conception and occasionally minute in detail (one learns, for example, that two Soviet Hispanists died at the front in the Second World War). ₁₀ Maiskii and Meshcheriakov's important role in the discipline is underscored, and each scholar's legacy is compared through both their scholarship and the continuing work of their students.
Pozharskaia's work is quite selective and in no way intended to approach the thoroughness of Gluzhinskaia's earlier bibliographies of the field. Yet no Soviet-era scholar, not even Gluzhinskaia, systematically and critically examined the entire corpus of Soviet research on this topic. Indeed, it was not until the post-Soviet period that a Russian scholar was able to conduct a complete and rigorous traversal of the literature. M. V. Novikov's two works—a 1994 extended historiographic review and a 1995 monograph on Soviet participation in the civil war—come closer than any previous studies to providing a satisfying conception of the historiographic problems inherent in this topic. ₁₁ In his review essay, Novikov examined not only all secondary sources, dissertation abstracts, and memoirs, but also all known published and unpublished archival sources. As a result, Novikov was the first scholar to comment on and assess the usefulness for such study of the multi-volume Soviet Foreign Ministry documents and the collected materials of the VII Comintern Congress, both published in the mid-1970s. In his 1995 monograph, SSSR, Komintern i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 1936-1939, Novikov's bibliographic essay is pared down from his earlier tour-de-force, but to his credit the author included an examination of foreign as well as Soviet literature. 2. Published Archival Documents
Despite years of rhetoric by Western Hispanists decrying the permanent closure of classified Soviet archives, ₁₂ on numerous occasions portions of the documentary evidence housed in Soviet collections have been published. The first published documents appeared during the war itself, either in the form of facsimiles printed in the press or in published collections of speeches and letters. ₁₃ In the years since the war, the Soviet Foreign Ministry on several occasions published volumes of general documents on foreign policy, four of which are relevant to events in Spain. Appearing in 1947, Volume Four of Vneshniaia politika SSSR: Sbornik dokumentov, is concerned only in part with Spain, and even then the material included is far from sensational. ₁₄ More useful are the three late volumes of Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR. Edited in the mid-1970s by A. A. Gromyko, they offer a great wealth of material still not fully incorporated into Western scholarship on the Spanish Civil War. ₁₅ Despite their neglect by Hispanists in Europe and North America, these volumes are quite reliable, and together contain close to one thousand official letters and memos on the Spanish war.	10
Published documents on Comintern activities in Spain and Soviet solidarity movements with the Spanish Republic have also appeared over the years. In 1975, the Institute of Marxism-Leninism published a selection of materials from the VII Comintern Congress, including letters, telegrams, and speeches on the Spanish war. ₁₆ Earlier, the official Soviet history of the civil war in Spain, Voina i revoliutsiia v Ispanii, 1936-1939, reproduced many important original documents. ₁₇ More recently, the Soviet Academy of Sciences published original materials relating to Ukrainian popular support for the Loyalist cause. ₁₈ 3. Soviet Memoir Accounts
Of the approximately 2,200 Soviets who would eventually serve in the Spanish war, around one hundred individuals published accounts of their experiences. This literature reflects the varied backgrounds of those Soviets involved in the Spanish struggle, who included journalists, diplomats, filmmakers, translators, officers, pilots, and general military support staff. Many of these memoirs offer valuable insights into the Soviet experience in Spain. As is the case with the secondary and primary published documentation, few of these sources have worked their way into Western accounts of the war. While many deserve a place of greater prominence, on the whole this literature must be approached with caution. In particular, most Soviet memoirs published from the 1950s to 1970s—an era of rigid censorship—clearly betray official biases and attitudes. Novikov, in a recent survey of the material, cautions that memoirs of this period "possess great weaknesses, vagueness, and the required distortion of facts." ₁₉ Novikov also notes that few of these memoirists were ever in Spain long enough to develop an objective understanding of the Spanish situation, since, as a rule, few Russians stayed in Spain longer than six months. ₂₀ Notable exceptions to the short tour rule were the two leading Russian press correspondents who served in Spain: Mikhail Kol'tsov and Ilya Ehrenburg, both of whom produced important eyewitness accounts of their experiences.
Kol'tsov was the first Soviet representative dispatched to Madrid after the 18 July rebel uprising. He departed Moscow on 6 August and arrived in the Republican zone two days later. Kol'tsov's weekly articles in Pravda, published between August 1936 and November 1937, were assembled in what would become one of the key documents of the entire war, the two-volume Ispanskii dnevnik, or Spanish Diary. The first volume of the Spanish Diary was published in 1938, but Kol'tsov never lived to see the publication of the second volume. ₂₁ He was executed on 2 February 1940. For Kol'tsov, like many of his compatriots who served in Spain, the Spanish assignment virtually assured his own destruction. In 1957, the two-volume version of Spanish Diary finally appeared, but even then the work was marred by numerous cuts. ₂ The original Russian-language version as conceived by the author was not restored until 1987. ₂₃
Ilya Ehrenburg, meanwhile, was sent to Spain as Izvestiia's war correspondent. Arriving just weeks after Kol'tsov, Ehrenburg's activities in Spain, like those of his colleague, ranged well beyond the work of a reporter. Though supplying his paper with regular dispatches, he took up projects oriented towards propaganda, including agit-prop tours with mobile cinemas offering Soviet feature films. Before the arrival in Catalonia of Consul General Antonov-Ovseenko, the journalist also prepared detailed reports for the Soviet military attaché in Madrid. Ehrenburg survived the post-war immolation to publish his reflections on the Spanish war in several works, including his multi-volume autobiography, Liudi, gody, zhizn', ₂₄ and Ispanskie reportazhi, ₂₅ a collection of articles posted from Spain. Of the two, the memoirs are certainly the better place to seek an insightful and honest account of Ehrenburg's experiences in Spain. In Ispanskie reportazhi, the author made no attempt at objectivity. An ardent partisan, Ehrenburg relentlessly lauded the Republican defenders and focused on the larger humanitarian issues at stake in their struggle. Certainly, he ranks with the most effective propagandists of the war.
Due to the nature of the Soviet mission in Spain, reminiscences by men in uniform constitute a large percentage of the published eyewitness accounts. In fact, nearly every major section of the Soviet military forces are in some way represented through these primary sources, including the general staff advisor Meretskov; war commissar advisor Nesterenko; chief artillery advisors Voronov and Goff; chief naval advisors Kuznetsov and Piterskii; Central Army advisors Malinovskii and Shumilov; Twelfth International Brigade advisor Batov; Eleventh International Brigade and Fifth Communist Regiment advisor Rodimtsev; commander of mechanized regiments Krivoshein; fighter pilots Iakushin, Osipenko, Puzeikin, Smirnov, and Gusev; bomber pilot Prokof'ev; tank commander Krivoshein; mine specialist Starinov; intelligence specialists Vaupshasov and Vasilevskii; and many others. ₂₆	15
Reminiscences of Soviet participants in the Spanish war were first published in 1959 in a collection of short essays and eyewitness accounts. The editor for this project was Ivan Maiskii, a former Soviet ambassador to Britain and representative to the Non-Intervention Committee. After World War II, Maiskii took up modern Spanish history in his spare time, a diversion that quickly became a second career. In 1957, Maiskii gathered together a group of historians from the Academy of Sciences and the Moscow Committee of Veterans of the Spanish war: modern Soviet Hispanic studies had been born. Maiskii's first project culled together articles by numerous actors in the Spanish conflict, including Kuznetsov, Batov, Rodimtsev, Krivoshein, Siutat, and Nesterenko. ₂₇ Maiskii edited a second volume of personal accounts several years later. ₂₈ In 1962, he published his own memoirs of the Spanish war, Ispanskii tetrady, or Spanish Notebooks, a work of considerable humor and irony, if at times deceptive regarding Soviet policy. Despite its flaws, Spanish Notebooks would become one of the best known and most widely used Soviet sources on the war available to Western scholars. ₂₉ Finally, the year 1965 saw the publication of Pod znamenem Ispanskoi respubliki, the last collection of reminiscences issued under Maiskii's direction, and one which includes a number of strikingly critical, though perhaps unwitting, assessments of Soviet effectiveness in the war. ₃₀
Active groups of Soviet war veterans of the Spanish conflict were not confined to Moscow. The Leningrad section boasted many surviving participants of the Spanish war. In 1967, a group of nearly three-dozen former participants submitted short reminiscences for publication. The result was Leningradtsy v Ispanii, a work of considerable popularity and one which appeared twice again with revisions, once in the early 1970s and again as recently as 1989. ₃₁ Other works of collected reminiscences include the 1976 Ukrainian publication of Vmeste s patriotami Ispanii, which underwent two additional editions, and the popular, usually reliable My internatsionalisty, a work which first appeared in 1969. ₃₂
Among the most quoted Soviet memoirists is Nikolai Kuznetsov (1902-1974), the chief Soviet naval advisor to the Republic and commander-in-chief of the Soviet navy during the Second World War, who published two separate reminiscences of his service during the Spanish war: Na dalekom meridiane (3rd ed., 1988), and Nakanune (1969). Sixteen years after his death, Kuznetsov's various memoirs were reedited and abridged into a single work, Ministr flota vspominaet (1990), which also appeared in an English edition, Memoirs of Wartime Minister of the Navy. Kuznetsov's memoirs do much to clarify Soviet naval activities—in particular the logistics problem faced by the Soviet navy in transporting hardware to Spain. His accounts, however, contain numerous errors of date and fact, and must be used cautiously and always with reservation.
Some of the mistakes in Kuznetsov's reminiscences may not be intentional, but a few problems are clearly deliberate attempts to revise out of the record Stalin's more odious machinations in Spain. For example, although Kuznetsov arrived in Madrid on 5 September—or a week after the Soviet ambassador Rosenberg—-he claims that "six months later" he and Rosenberg undertook a trip together to Albacete. If so, the date of this voyage would have been early March 1937. Rosenberg's Spanish sojourn lasted only until 9 February, when he was replaced by Jacob Gaikis and recalled to Moscow. That this was not a careless mistake is revealed elsewhere, when Kuznetsov brazenly attempts to assure his readers that the Soviet diplomatic corps functioned normally through the first year of the war, and without abrupt personnel changes:
In the beginning of August 1937, I was summoned to Moscow. I made a brief stop in Valencia, where the ambassador Rosenberg discharged my commission.... In Barcelona I had the pleasure of staying with our consul V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko.... ₃₃	20
Thus Kuznetsov claims to have spent his last days in the Republic with the two diplomats who had not only been recalled from Spain—Rosenberg six months before, Antonov-Ovseenko probably in June 1937—but in all likelihood had already been executed on Stalin's orders.
A small number of other Soviet memoirs may not offer important insights on the major geo-strategic goals of Soviet policy, but shed important light on oft-neglected issues. Take, for example, the 1972 work of Roman Karmen, No Pasaran! ₃₄ Karmen was one of two official Soviet cinematographers who shot footage in Spain and edited newsreels for screening in the Soviet market. After Kol'tsov, he was among the very first Soviets to reach Spain in August 1936, arriving ahead of the diplomatic corps and military advisors. His account, wholly unknown in Western versions of the civil war, illustrates very well the day-to-day activities of a non-military representative of the Stalinist regime. Of equal value, though even less known in the West, is the account of journalist Ovadei Savich, Dva goda v Ispanii, a work of considerable popularity in the USSR and one reprinted several times. ₃₅
Similarly, Paulina and Adelina Abramson's more recent Mosaico Roto gives us the only major memoir of the Soviet linguistic team sent to Spain to carry out interpretive and translation work. ₃₆ The Abramson sisters, who emigrated from Argentina to the USSR in the 1920s, shadowed many of the major Soviet diplomatic and military officials in the Republican zone. Their insights provide a unique impressionistic pastiche of the familial atmosphere among Moscow's personnel on the ground in Spain.
Finally, the two most cited and controversial Soviet memoirs must be briefly addressed. These are the works of the lone Soviet emigrants who fled Spain during the Soviet intervention: Walter G. Krivitsky and Alexander Orlov. Krivitsky referred to himself as the "sole survivor abroad of the group of Soviet officials who had a direct hand in organizing Soviet intervention in Spain" and claimed that his title was "Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe." As if these grandiloquent statements did not bestow sufficient legitimacy upon their author, Krivitsky added that he "was on the inside of every major step taken in the Spanish matter by the Kremlin," a claim made rather more dubious in the last few years, as no declassified Soviet document has mentioned his name. ₃₇
Krivitsky's work is one of the most problematic sources in the Russian historiography of the war. His thesis is that Stalin ruthlessly used the Spanish Republic in a war of wills with the German and Italian dictators. According to Krivitsky, Stalin "succeeded in murderous intrigue, but he failed in waging war." To be sure, many of Krivitsky's claims concerning Stalin's goals are not credible. In his emphasis on Stalin's single-minded desire to acquire the Spanish gold, for example, Krivitsky ignored the complex, multi-faceted nature of Soviet participation in the war.	25
In addition, there is some doubt as to how much power Krivitsky wielded in or out of Spain. Alexander Orlov, in his unpublished "Answers to the Questionnaire of Prof. S. G. Payne" (1968), denied that Krivitsky was a high-ranking Soviet official of any sort, and stressed that "he had never been chief of intelligence in all of Europe—such a post never existed—but served as an NKVD 'letter drop,' the lowliest denomination on the operative scale." ₃₈ Yet Orlov's pronouncement is itself an exaggeration. Granted, the title "Chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Western Europe" was almost certainly an invention of the book's ghost-writer, Isaac Don Levine, but it does appear that Krivitsky was the NKVD intelligence resident in The Hague, from which he doubtlessly played a key role in Soviet operations through much of Western Europe.
Furthermore, archival declassifications now reveal that several of Krivitsky's hitherto doubted allegations were quite accurate all along. For example, Krivitsky seems to pinpoint precisely both the day Stalin approved the decision to assist the Republic (14 September) and the first major arrival in Spain of Russian military hardware (15 October). He also comes very close to estimating the total number of Soviet personnel—"approximately 2000"—who served in Spain. ₃₉ In short, Krivitsky now deserves a general rehabilitation as a source who, though not always accurate, cannot be summarily dismissed. 4. Soviet and Post-Soviet Secondary Works
Soviet academic scholarship on the civil war is generally of less use than the memoir accounts in revising interpretations of Stalin's intervention. Most Russian works on this topic prior to 1991 were unambiguous in their support for Soviet policy. Moreover, Soviet scholars enjoyed few advantages over their Western counterparts in accessing archival records, apart from those released for publication that are discussed above. Nonetheless, it should be acknowledged that post-World War II Soviet researchers produced a sizeable amount of scholarship on this problem, ably chronicled in the two comprehensive bibliographies in Problemy ispanskoi istorii. The USSR's close connection with the Spanish Republic helped spawn several generations of enthusiastic Hispanists through the 1950s and 1960s, many of whom followed the lead of the father of modern Hispanism, Ivan Maiskii.
Several Soviet studies produced during the 1970s and 1980s should be singled out for their usefulness. The 1972 work released by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, International Solidarity with the Spanish Republic, 1936-1939, is a reliable account of official Soviet policy towards Spain as expressed in the press. This work does not, of course, provide any sense of the Kremlin's largely concealed strategic and political motivations for the intervention in Spain, but it is invaluable in its reproduction of official Soviet announcements and press accounts of Moscow's relationship with the Republic.
Three important Soviet works from the 1970s consider the impact of the Spanish war on Soviet domestic society. The 1972 dissertation by V. A. Talashova, "Sovetskii komsomol - aktivnyi uchastnik dvizheniia solidarnosti s respublikanskoi Ispaniei v period natsional'no revoliutsionnoi voiny, 1936-1939," was the first to document how the war was received among the Soviet public. Talashova, who enjoyed access to numerous regional Party archives, meticulously traced the CPUSSR's rigorous domestic promotion of the Spanish war and its attempts to rally Soviet citizens to noisily demonstrate in favor of the Republic. This work also provides extensive evidence of the Soviet regime's importation and exploitation of Spanish-produced books, plays, and music in fostering the ongoing domestic preoccupation with the Republican cause.	30
The work of V. V. Kuleshova, Ispaniia i SSSR: Kulturnye sviazi, 1917-1939, may be considered an important complement to Talashova. ₄₀ Kuleshova's emphasis is on the various cultural exchanges effected between the USSR and Spain in the years leading up to and during the Spanish Civil War. Finally, Afanasii Arsen'evich Komshukov's "Natsional'no-revoliutsionnaia voina ispanskogo naroda 1936-1939 gg. i sovetskaia obshchestvennost'" continues in much the same vein, concentrating on the myriad manifestations of Soviet interest in and solidarity with the Republican cause. ₄₁ Especially useful in Komshukov are references to the archives of the Soviet agency charged with overseeing the upbringing of the 3000 Spanish children evacuated to the USSR in 1937 and 1938.
Despite the advances by Soviet scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, genuinely independent Russian scholarship on Spain would have to wait until the fall of the USSR in 1991. ₄₂ Indeed, a clear turning point in Russian studies of the civil war occurred that same year, with the approval of a doctoral dissertation at Leningrad State University. The author was Vladimir Aleksandrovich Tolmachaev, who was the first Russian to both use extensive archival evidence and criticize aspects of the Soviet role in Spain. ₄₃ Indeed, Tolmachaev's allegation that Kremlin officials fostered "a suspicious, hateful atmosphere" in Spain would have been unthinkable even five years before. ₄₄ Given the revelations to emerge in the decade since Tolmachaev's work first appeared, it is now evident that the author exercised great restraint in his assessment.
A work that went further still, and revealed for the first time the wealth of untapped archival collections, was the study of Colonel Iurii Ribalkin, a research historian at Moscow's Institute of Military History. Ribalkin's account appeared as a dissertation in 1992 and was finally published in Moscow as a monograph in a slightly revised version in 2000. ₄₅ His study focuses rather narrowly on the military intervention, and ignores the other Soviet motivations for being involved with the Republic. In Ribalkin's version, the military intervention was planned by the Defense Commissariat with great precision, and the logistics were handled by the Red Army naval forces with admirable dedication and invention. The sale of arms to the Republic is depicted as fair and equitable; there is no sense of the double-dealing thievery recounted by Howson (see below). At times, Ribalkin is guilty of Soviet-era hyperbole, portraying the Soviet advisors and ground personnel in jarringly heroic terms. Yet Ribalkin also outlines in some detail the destructive actions of Stalin's NKVD operatives in the Republic. One of his main arguments is that Moscow's men on the ground were often impeded in their work by the Kremlin itself, which sent contradictory directives and was always quick to discipline any action or behavior deemed unacceptable.
A post-Soviet work of greater breadth is M. V. Novikov's 1995 SSSR, Komintern i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii 1936-1939. ₄₆ Novikov's work was the first post-Soviet published monograph on the Spanish war to incorporate declassified materials. The author's access to RGASPI, RGVA, and GARF sources alone made its release an anticipated and most welcome scholarly event. Its greatest strength lies in the author's meticulously assembled historiographic sections, already discussed above. Otherwise the work is of uneven quality and reliability.
The most conspicuous shortcoming is Novikov's lack of Spanish archival and secondary materials. What emerges here is very much the Soviet side of the war, with little or no attempt to examine the viewpoint or experience of the Republic. A notable gap, for example, is apparent in the diplomatic section. In his discussion of the difficulties encountered as the Spaniards and Soviets attempted to exchange diplomats, Novikov pays almost no attention to the Republic's end. In Novikov's version, the Soviet ambassador Lunacharskii dies on the C�te d'Azur in 1933, the issue is tabled, and only after the beginning of the war does Rosenberg eventually arrive in Madrid and present his credentials to Azaña. Why Madrid delayed in naming an ambassador, or who eventually represented the Republic in the fall of 1936, is never discussed. Indeed, the Pascua mission to Moscow—the great promise it held for the Republic and its ultimate withering and emasculation—is not even mentioned.	35
The prize for the most slipshod post-Soviet account by Russian researchers must go to the military journalists Oleg Sarin and Lev Dvoretsky, whose 1996 work, Alien Wars: The Soviet Union's Aggressions Against the World, 1919-1989, brings little declassified data to light but does repeat innumerable errors and inconsistencies from a half-century of Soviet-era studies. ₄₇ Relying on a total of just twelve references, mostly secondary sources dating from the 1960s, the brief chapter on Spain is a veritable cyclopedia of misinformation and careless errors. We learn, among many other historical fallacies, that Tsarist Russia had no diplomatic relations with Spain (Imperial Russia was represented in Spain by nearly two-dozen high-ranking diplomats from 1727 on); that Soviet ambassador Rosenberg arrived after the consul general to Barcelona (Rosenberg arrived five weeks before his colleague); and that Soviet translators and interpreters sent to Spain were primarily men (they were nearly all women). To be sure, these points of detail ignore both larger and smaller problems in the text. The authors claim that Stalin's overall goal in the civil war was "to turn Spain into a Communist country." This statement is by any measure an exaggeration and oversimplification that belies the complex Soviet relationship with both the Republic and with other Western European states. There are also numberless errors of orthography and transliteration, but to list them here would merely lend undue credence to a poorly researched and ineptly edited project that adds nothing reliable to the existing scholarship. II. Spanish Contributions to the Historiography
Given the geographic centrality of the Iberian Peninsula to the problem of Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War, it is perhaps surprising that Spanish scholars have until recently contributed relatively little to the literature on this topic. Until the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, there were, of course, daunting obstacles to academic freedom in Spain. Scholars wishing to study official Republican government records had to wait for a comprehensive reorganization of state archives, a process not completed in some cases until the early 1980s.
This should not imply that prior to Franco's death, Spaniards did not undertake work on the Soviet question. They did indeed. Nearly all scholarship by Spanish nationals was tainted, however, by ideological bias. The Franquista interpretation held that the July uprising was a direct response to a Communist plot to take over the Republic. Nationalist historians did not need to discuss the particulars of Soviet aid to the Republic during the course of the war, since they portrayed the entire struggle as a campaign to rid Spain of an invading Red army. This historiographic trend, though based largely on right-wing propaganda that pre-dated the war, resulted in a series of Western academic responses whose principal goal was the disproving of Franquista theories of pre-war Soviet intervention. ₄₈
Only unreconstructed Spanish Communists took a favorable view of Moscow's involvement in the civil war. These were relatively few in number, as Stalin had admitted to the USSR no more than a handful of Communist exiles in 1939. The most senior Spanish Communist to take up residence in Moscow, and the only one to write on the war, was Dolores Ibárruri. Indeed, the principal Spanish Communist interpretation of the war, the four-volume 1966 Guerra y revolución en España 1936-1939, which appeared simultaneously in Spanish and Russian, was written largely by Ibárruri, though she is credited only as presiding over a group of contributors, which included Manuel Azcárate, Luis Balaguer, Antonio Cordón, Irene Falcón, and José Sandoval. ₄₉ The thesis of Guerra y revolución is identical to official Soviet account of the war. In this version, the rebel uprising was part of a fascist takeover of the peninsula, and the Republican defense was deemed a "national-revolutionary war" of liberation. Insofar as Soviet assistance is considered in Guerra y revolución, the discussion is largely limited to humanitarian aid and diplomatic support—though even here the emphasis is rather uneven. Little is made, for example, of the Soviet reception of some 3000 evacuated Republican children, a topic one might have expected to be exploited in some detail. ₅₀ None of the controversial issues concerning the Soviet intervention are taken up. There is only passing mention to the presence of Soviet hardware on the peninsula, and none at all of Moscow's manipulation of Republican politics; the Soviet role in exacerbating tensions between the POUM and the Republican government is ignored as well. Indeed, at times the omission of any mention of direct Soviet involvement becomes the unacknowledged elephant in the room, such as in the third chapter of the second volume, entitled "La Intervención Extranjera"; neither Stalin, the Kremlin, the Red Army, nor its advisory apparatus make an appearance.
In addition to the Nationalist and PCE versions, two other Franco-era Spanish interpretations bear mentioning. The first is the anti-Stalinist communist version—in effect, that of the POUM—which blames the defeat of the Spanish revolution in 1936 and 1937 on Moscow's anti-Trotskyist crimes in the Republican zone. The chief proponent of this theory, Victor Alba, argues that the main Soviet motivation for entering into the Spanish conflict was to wage war on Stalin's enemy du jour: non-conformist international communists. ₅₁	40
Finally, non-Communist Loyalist interpretations tend to view the Soviet intervention as having contributed directly to the Republic's defeat. Epitomizing this version are the numerous publications of the Left Socialist Luis Araquistain, a close associate of Largo Caballero and the Republic's ambassador to France from the autumn of 1936 until early 1938. ₅₂ Among Araquistain's many accusations against the Soviets is the author's comparison of Stalin's aid to the Republic in 1936 with Tsar Alexander I's military sales to the Spanish crown in the early nineteenth century; on both occasions, he argues, outdated hardware and supplies were sold at vastly inflated prices. ₅₃ Araquistain's broader thesis is that Soviet intervention in Spain was motivated by three considerations:
The civil war was an opportunity for graft and swindle. Araquistain draws a sharp contrast between the German and Italian credit granted to the Nationalists and Stalin's demand for the Republic's gold stocks up front. The conflict was an ideal opportunity for the Soviet Union to test in combat a new generation of Red Army weaponry. Strategically, Stalin's support of the Republic kept Germany occupied in Western Europe, thus taking pressure off of the Soviet frontiers. ₅₄
While it must be admitted that parts of Araquistain's analysis have been borne out by recent declassifications, on the whole he exaggerates the case of Soviet malfeasance and makes Stalin a far more powerful force in the Spanish theater than he now appears to have been.
In his zeal to blame all of the Republic's problems on Moscow, his argument is often confoundingly contradictory. If the Kremlin sold the Republic hardware dating from the 1860s, it may reasonably asked, why would the Red Army need to test these weapons in Spain? One may argue that Moscow exploited the civil war as an opportunity to test weapons, but if so, it is only logical to admit that these must have been the newest products in the Soviet arsenal. Furthermore, in a remarkable rhetorical convolution, Araquistain implies that the Soviet Union's role in the conflict was less benign than even Germany and Italy's. The fascist dictators have the author's grudging respect for giving the Nationalists arms on credit and maintaining supply throughout the war. The Soviet Union, he argues, insisted on selling the arms, then "slowly starved Spain" of weaponry midway through the conflict. ₅₅ Araquistain is not alone in demonizing the Soviets for the sale (as opposed to the gift), or supplying on credit, of arms. Indeed, in his autobiography, Claude Bowers, the American ambassador to Spain, could not resist underscoring the commercial arrangement that constituted the Kremlin's aid to the Republic. In October of 1936, he wrote, "Russia began selling tanks and planes to the loyalists—but it sold them, did not give them." ₅₆
In general, Araquistain's interpretation typifies the post-war Loyalist abdication of any responsibility for the events that not only convulsed Spain from 1931 to 1939, but also eventually led to the four-decade Franco dictatorship. Conspicuously absent from these interpretations are factors that would certainly militate against his all-encompassing demonization of the Soviet Union. Any discussion of the gradual internationalization of the conflict must acknowledge that the Soviet Union became the principal arms supplier to the Republic only after Madrid had been conclusively abandoned by Britain and France. Thus the Soviet presence in Spain, part of which was undoubtedly harmful, did not materialize out of thin air; it was a direct response to the Republic's international isolation in July and August 1936. Furthermore, the civil war itself was precipitated by grave errors, miscalculations, and anti-democratic excesses by both the Spanish Left and Right. Going back even further, it must be borne in mind that the conflict had its origins in the first half of the nineteenth century, and was the third civil war fought in Spain in one hundred years.	45
In the period after 1975, many Spanish researchers took up in some fashion the problem of Soviet involvement in the war. The great majority of these studies were decidedly unambitious in length and scope. In the first two decades after the transition, Spanish research on the Soviet intervention rarely strayed from the brief article format. Many of these appeared in Historia 16 and Tiempo de Historia, historical journals whose appearance in the mid-1970s held much promise for the revision of the Franquista version of twentieth-century Spain. Unfortunately, very few of the pieces that ran in these journals—both of which, incidentally, should be considered as rare popular-academic hybrids—confronted in a rigorous manner the legacy of Moscow's intervention in the Republic. The scholarship in Tiempo de Historia, in particular, where trained historians presented their work alongside that of armchair amateurs, was often of very dubious quality. The result was a series of poorly documented, speculative articles that relied heavily on disputed Republican memoir accounts. Characteristic of the uneven quality of work in the journal were the entries submitted by Juan García Durán, a historian trained at the Sorbonne and a prolific writer on numerous topics related to the Soviet intervention. ₅₇ With the exception of the author's use of Kuznetsov's memoir, none of García Durán's work exploited published Soviet primary or secondary sources.
As a rule, for the past quarter century Spaniards working on topics related to the USSR and the Spanish Republic have not written book-length studies of the problem. Certainly, a handful of Spanish historians have produced monographs related to larger issues surrounding Soviet assistance, but many of these are plagued by the same shortcomings as their briefer cousins. In general, Spanish researchers of this topic have neglected to venture far beyond the Pyrenees, eschewing Russian-language sources and pleading ignorance regarding even the most ubiquitous official sources, such as the invaluable multi-volume series Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, three volumes of which (XIX-XXI) take up the Soviet connection with the Spanish Republic in great detail. ₅₈
Three recent studies that illustrate the serious deficiencies of Spanish research on this topic are Ricardo de la Cierva's 1997 Brigadas Internacionales, 1936-1996: La verdadera historia: Mentira histórica y error de Estado; Francisco Olaya Morales' 1998 El Oro de Negrín; and Olaya Morales' earlier La intervención extranjera en la guerra civil. ₅₉ In a fashion typical of many contemporary Spanish researchers, la Cierva is very much aware of the recently declassified Russian archives, but he does not look into them seriously. Despite the late date of his book—seven years after the opening of former Soviet records on the topic—he dismisses any research in the Russian Federation in these brief lines:
Naturally there exist interesting document collections, above all the military archives of the USSR, today dependent on the government of the Federation of Russia. I have no concrete news regarding the possible use of these archives, which perhaps have been sold to the shelves of western institutions. (Naturalmente que en ellos existen fondos interesantes, sobre todo en los archivos militares de la URSS, ahora dependientes del Gobierno de la Federación Rusa. No tengo noticias concretas sobre la posible utilización de esos archivos, que tal vez se hayan vendido por estanterías a instituciones occidentales.) ₆₀
Olaya Morales is guilty of the same neglect. Referring to the quantity of weaponry sent from the USSR to the Republic, the author laments not being able to verify his count with official Soviet records:	50
Of course, all of these figures are hypothetical and it will be impossible to know with accuracy the truth so long as the Russian archives ... remain inaccessible to researchers.... (Desde luego, todas estas cifras son hipotéticas y será imposible poder conocer con exactidud la verdad mientras los archivos rusos y los de las personalidades republicanas españolas que intervinieron en ello no se abran a los investigadores, ofreciendo pruebas irrebatibles.) ₆₁
At the time of Olaya Morales wrote these words, the Soviet archives had been open for six years. In his 1990 study for Madre Tierra, the same author ignores even more fastidiously the subtopic of Soviet aid, a failure that is all the more conspicuous given both the work's sweeping title—La intervención extranjera en la guerra civil—and the splashy, ambitious promise posted in bold lettering on the book's dust jacket:
Estudio fundamental sobre la intervención y la no intervención extranjera en la Guerra Civil. Elaborado a base de la utilización de una amplísima documentación, procedente sobre todo de archivos...
There are exceptions, however. A number of Spanish projects related to the Soviet-Republican problem have proved more satisfactory, including Angel Viñas' numerous volumes on the fate of the Spanish gold during the civil war; ₆₂ Enrique Zafra, Rosalía Crego, and Carmen Heredia's well-researched 1989 treatment of the Spanish children evacuated to the USSR; ₆₃ Antonio San Román Sevillano's doctoral dissertation on the development of Soviet friendship societies in Spain during the Second Republic and civil war; ₆₄ Juan Avilés Farré's monograph on the impact of the Russian Revolution on Spanish politics and belles lettres to 1931; ₆₅ José Fernández Sánchez's multiple shorter though mostly reliable accounts of discreet aspects of Soviet intervention—most impressively, the recent Rusos en el Frente del Norte (1937); ₆₆ Cesar Vidal's 1998 treatment of the International Brigades, which makes use of a small but important sampling of declassified documents from the former Party Archive in Moscow (now RGASPI); ₆₇ and, most impressively, Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo's comprehensive account of Comintern activities in Spain from 1919 to the end of the civil war. ₆₈ Though only half of this group exploited Soviet published materials or recently declassified Russian sources, together they have done much to fill out the picture of Soviet involvement with Spain in the years during and prior to the Spanish Civil War, even if none provides a comprehensive study of the many facets of the subject. III. Western Interpretations of the Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War
For many years, Soviet and Spanish narratives of the Soviet intervention in Spain were surpassed in every way by the work of scholars in the West, principally those working in North America, Britain, and France. In the early 1950s, American scholars produced a flurry of studies on the topic. Two of the monographs concerning the Soviets and the civil war were researched and written by the young political scientist David Cattell. His first volume, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (1955), considers the role of the Comintern and the CPUSSR in the events of the first half of 1937. ₆₉ Based on a wide range of source materials, this study analyzes the extent of Soviet contributions to the Loyalist cause and the influence of the Spanish Communists and Soviet agents on the Republican government. Cattell suggests that the Communists had many opportunities to seize power, such as in May 1937, but Moscow held them back. The author is quick to admit when he is baffled or when the evidence does not allow for anything beyond conjecture.	55
Cattell's next project, Soviet Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War, detailed the course of Moscow's participation in the infamous, oxymoronic Non-Intervention Committee (NIC). Cattell's thesis is that the Soviets were betrayed by Britain and France, both in the proceedings of the NIC and over the course of the war. Furthermore, Moscow's disenchantment with the possibilities for an anti-fascist alliance, coupled with the Munich accord, led Stalin to sign the Russo-German pact of August 1939. Munich's message to Stalin was that Chamberlain assumed that England and France could appease, outwit, and eventually outfight the Axis without Soviet support. This proved, in Cattell's words, "almost fatal for both democracy and communism." ₇₀
Given the author's complete lack of access to either official Spanish or Soviet documents, one must credit Cattell with an admirable reconstruction of Soviet activities in Spain. In general, however, it now appears that the Soviet Union comes off in far too favorable a light in Cattell's version of the intervention. Of course, one must understand that Cattell's study, like that of both Plumb and Allen (discussed below), was to a large degree a direct response to Nationalist propaganda that implicated the Soviet Union in the origins of the civil war. In seeking to overturn erroneous Franquista claims, Cattell goes too far in the other direction, dismissing many justified accusations of Soviet malfeasance in the Spanish arena.
Appearing at approximately the same time as the Cattell studies were two doctoral dissertations treating the general question of Soviet involvement in the war: Robert Lee Plumb's "Soviet Participation in the Spanish Civil War" and David E. Allen's "The Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939." ₇₁ It is surprising indeed that neither of these works was ever published, as both deserve to be widely diffused and debated. Plumb succeeded—in an era of total archival inaccessibility—at collecting important material on Russian activity in the civil war, and he accurately traced the basic outline of the intervention. Allen's great achievement, meanwhile, was his use of the Soviet press. The work is essentially the account as presented officially by the Kremlin, though the author lets nothing pass without a required qualifier. In possession of no convincing evidence, Allen proposes various potential versions of Soviet motivations and actions, judiciously discarding those that cross the line into implausibility.
A number of Western secondary works dealing mainly with Soviet foreign policy also do much to illuminate the Kremlin's activities in the Spanish Civil War. Among the most interesting approaches—each published in 1984 but coming to radically different conclusions—are Jonathan Haslam's The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe: 1933-1939, and Jiri Hochman's The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security. ₇₂ In a review article on these books, Peter B. Kaufman suggests that Haslam and Hochman exemplify the two sides of an ongoing historiographic debate. ₇₃ In this schema, Haslam represents the traditional interpretation, emphasizing that the Soviets were committed to forging collective security with the West and that, when it failed, the West was largely to blame. Hochman, on the other hand, stands for the radical and minority interpretation. He debunks the Haslam approach, arguing instead that the Soviets never looked at Germany as a mere second choice, but sabotaged agreements with the West in order to effect an alliance with the Nazis. Haslam views Litvinov as a tireless lobbyist for collective security; Hochman regards him as the reason why collective security failed. In short, Haslam blames both the West and those forces within the Kremlin working against an alliance with the West, while Hochman places nearly all the blame on the Soviets—especially Litvinov—for leading a duplicitous foreign policy which never committed strongly enough to either the West or the Nazis to form a lasting coalition which might have prevented the war.
Haslam's thesis is not new; it has been espoused by the earlier authors discussed above (Cattell, Plumb, Allen), and is the logical conclusion if only the Western diplomatic records are considered and Litvinov is deemed the sole arbiter of Soviet foreign policy. Haslam defends Litvinov and the Soviets' sincerity throughout. He claims that Stalin was driven by the West to a policy of "fortress Russia" and ultimately into the Germans' hands. What is new and compelling in Hochman's book is the suggestion that the primary motivation behind Soviet foreign policy was never the continuity of Russian imperialism nor the desire for world revolution, but rather the "concern of the elite to maintain power." ₇₄ Thus, internal security drove external policy, which was based on realpolitik, short-term necessity, and above all the self-preservation of the ruling elites.	60
Apropos of Hochman's thesis, it should be noted that one of the conclusions of this study is that, in the case of the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet leadership was presented with opportunities to promote external security while also buttressing support for the regime. This is especially evident in the many activities organized within the Soviet Union, whose main purpose was to reinforce the notion that the Spanish rebels were part of a larger international fascist plot that threatened Soviet sovereignty.
One of the most cogent and concise explanations of the Soviet intervention may be found in an essay by Denis Smyth in a collection of essays published in Belfast. ₇₅ Although rather short, Smyth's conclusions are quite sophisticated, and merit detailed summarization. First, Smyth argues that Soviet leaders needed several years of peace to develop their domestic plans and improve their military capabilities. The Soviet Union thus desired stability in Western Europe, and a Spanish Republic, as opposed to a Communist or fascist state, would greatly contribute to this. Support for the Spanish Republic was in effect buying the Soviets time before an eventual stand-off with Hitler. The main factor influencing Soviet policy vis-à-vis Spain was the hope that France would become the Soviets' military partner. Consequently, the fear that a Nationalist victory would be a serious threat to the security of France kept the Soviets in Spain for more than two years, or until the war became a lost cause.
Second, Smyth suggests that in 1936 the fomenting of Marxist revolutions abroad was not an objective of Soviet foreign policy. By that time, "socialism in one country," was the predominant goal, and no exception was made in the case of Spain. The Soviet policy of restraining, reversing, and repressing the revolutionary process inside the Republican zone was due to Stalin's determination that the regime there should present a moderate, bourgeois democratic image to Britain and France. A radical-left or Communist Spain would frighten off conservatives in Britain and France and thus prevent cooperation with the Soviets and the formation of an eventual anti-Nazi block.
Finally, as to why Soviet policy failed, Smyth asserts that, in suppressing the left-wing socialist and anarcho-syndicalist revolution (including the dismantling of agrarian collectives, returning of collectivized industries to private enterprise, and destruction of the POUM and the socialist and anarcho-syndicalist militia), the Communists deprived the Republicans of their domestic power base. Demoralized and divided, only British and French intervention could have saved the Republic. Already sabotaged by the Soviets, indifference in the West thus doomed the Republic. Stalin's policy was correct in all of its chief assumptions except one: anti-communist sentiment in Britain and France frustrated any hope for an international alliance of anti-fascist powers.
Although his analysis of the geo-strategic significance of Spain to the Soviet worldview is quite useful, Smyth's error is to focus too narrowly on this one facet. Smyth's attempts to confine Soviet policy to a straightjacket of one primary motivation, however, is quite common in the existing literature. One of the arguments stressed in this study is that the Soviet Union was always motivated by multiple considerations in its policy towards Spain.	65
Smyth's thesis is supported and augmented by Geoffrey Roberts' more recent essay, "Soviet Foreign Policy and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939." ₇₆ Roberts is loath to link Soviet policy in Spain with a single strategic theory, however, arguing instead that Moscow's reaction to events on the Iberian Peninsula "was informed by various strategic purposes—anti-fascism, collective security, popular frontism [and the] priority of defending and building socialism in the USSR." While Roberts admits that all of these were at play to varying degrees in the Kremlin's Spanish policy, none was more important than the defense of socialism at home and the advancement of Stalinist ideology. At times, Roberts argues, the immediate needs of the Spanish Republic more or less meshed with Moscow's ideological goals. When they did, Soviet assistance was invaluable to the Republic, and Soviet actions were largely altruistic. At other times, when the Soviet commitment to ideological purity imperiled the Republic's military viability, Moscow did not hesitate to sacrifice the latter for the former. ₇₇ Roberts' most compelling argument is to conclusively reject the earlier thesis that Moscow was entirely motivated in its Spanish policy by the pursuit of collective security with Britain and France. He argues instead that the USSR was in "an isolationist mood" by the summer of 1936. ₇₈
It should be borne in mind that all of these works, however useful, are concerned narrowly with Soviet foreign policy and do not take up in any detail the other principal features of Soviet participation in the civil war. In fact, after the burst of production in the 1950s, little additional work was attempted on the specific Soviet-Republican problem. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, the entire field was kept afloat by the tireless work of Burnett Bolloten, whose three studies on the Republic's wartime government progressively revealed a great deal about Soviet policy and activities in Spain. ₇₉ In Bolloten's oeuvre, far more than in the earlier general history by Hugh Thomas, the Soviet published sources long neglected in the Western historiography begin to be incorporated into a revised understanding of the war. Bolloten is concerned primarily with the net impact of Soviet intervention on the functioning and ideological direction of the Republic's government. His thesis has much in common with that of Araquistain. For Bolloten, the USSR's intervention was the basic source of the Republic's inability to quell the internal rebellion and turn the tide of the war. Yet in his treatment of Soviet involvement, Bolloten neglects many of the distinct facets of Moscow's interaction with Republican Spain, some of which, it should be pointed out, might cause him to revise his conclusions. In the last several years, numerous scholars have again taken up Bolloten's topic in earnest. Among the most important of these are two jointly authored works—one by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, the other by Mary Habeck and Ronald Radosh—and a monograph by Gerald Howson.
A very problematic work, and one whose value and accurateness is very difficult to assess, is John Costello and Oleg Tsarev's 1993 Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier Reveals Stalin's Master Spy, a work which purports to reveal the career of NKVD agent Alexander Orlov, a Soviet officer who served in Spain. ₈₀ The book is guilty of some of the worst excesses of popular or armchair historical publishing, where new discoveries are proclaimed in bold type splashed across the dust jacket. In addition to the embarrassing, movie-of-the-week title, Deadly Illusion's jacket copy features a 24-point assurance, proclaiming that the volume contains, "The KGB secrets the British government doesn't want you to read!"
Deadly Illusions is the first in a series of up to ten volumes to be published by the American firm Crown Publishers, who struck a million-dollar deal with the Russian intelligence service (FSB) to access former KGB archives. If it were only a matter of the not-unprecedented practice of paying for citation and translation rights to post-Soviet materials, the deal might have escaped the rigorous criticism with which it was greeted in the scholarly community. In fact, both the Crown representatives and those of the FSB demanded clauses be placed in the agreement that have justifiably raised a few eyebrows. Crown succeeded in winning guarantees that, until their ten-book project is complete, the FSB will withhold all the documents in question from any historians not directly participating in the project. The FSB, meanwhile, will have the sole authority to decide what documents the anointed historians are entitled to see. Said one American observer familiar with the deal, "The version of history that these books yield will be the KGB's own." ₈₁
The book presents numerous historiographic, methodological, and other related source problems. The study, which claims (among other things) to revise our understanding of Soviet machinations in Spain, is authored by an un-credentialed British historian with no training in either of the key languages of the topic, and who, evidently—if the acknowledgements page is any indication—consulted not a single authority in modern Spanish history. His colleague, Mr. Tsarev, meanwhile, is nothing less than a senior employee of the FSB, the successor organization to the NKVD, whose activities in Spain constitute the matter under scrutiny in the book itself. The presentation of source material is problematic: disputed works are cited alongside reputable ones, and, of course, the KGB documents are unavailable for any scholars seeking firsthand verification.	70
The undiscriminating presentation of source material in Deadly Illusions often gives way to simple errors of fact. In some sections of the work, these mistakes begin to mount significantly, often coming at the rate of one per line. The authors refer, for example, to the "Soviet T-10 tank overpowering German and Italian models," when, in fact, the Soviets sent the Republicans the tank models T-26 and BT-5. ₈₂ Problems such as these are common throughout the text, the following sentence being typical of Costello and Tsarev's slapdash account of the Spanish war:
Even in the hands of hastily trained Republican pilots and crews the firepower and maneuverability of the Soviet weapons proved superior to Nationalist tanks and aircraft during the December battles for Madrid. ₈₃
The authors erroneously claim that Republican pilots and crews were at the helm of Soviet hardware. None of this is footnoted, but it is hard not to conclude the authors are working from outdated Soviet texts that did not acknowledge the direct participation of Soviet pilots and tank crews. In fact, in the first months of Moscow's military intervention, nearly all aerial sorties in Soviet aircraft were carried out by Soviet pilots. So ill prepared was the Loyalist air force that the Republic was forced to send its fledgling pilots to the USSR for intensive training; Republican fliers would not relieve the Soviet pilots until well into 1937. The composition of tank crews was similar, though here the Republican army made more rapid progress. At any rate, there can be no disputing that Soviet military personnel were in full control of the first important shipments of hardware in late 1936, and without a doubt through the whole of the Battle of Madrid.
These errors are unfortunate, since many of the issues addressed are of vital importance to understanding the role of the Soviet secret police in the Spanish war. In some areas, the authors succeed very well in revealing the answers to long-disputed Soviet actions—most notably Orlov's complicity in the kidnapping and murder of Andreu Nin. Elsewhere, the book marshals little evidence to support Orlov's own claims of his role in Spain. More to the point, the unsubstantiated nature of some statements in Deadly Illusions, coupled with the questionable deal struck between the publisher and the FSB archive, do not inspire confidence in the book's overall findings.
A newer work offering far more solid research is Gerald Howson's Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War. ₈₄ Howson's study is principally concerned with reconstructing the Soviet supply of arms to the Spanish Republic. In doing so, he succeeds in bringing to light a number of important aspects of Soviet military assistance. Howson's most startling discovery is that the Soviets overcharged the Republic for nearly all of the weapons supplied. In addition, Howson repeats the familiar accusation that many Soviet arms sent to Spain were either outdated, or so obsolete that their repair and resupply would be exceedingly difficult. To be sure, revelations in this volume do a great deal to further diminish any residual Soviet claims to benevolence in their involvement in the civil war.	75
Curiously, Howson never addresses a nagging question that this Soviet duplicity in the arms trade raises: How did Moscow succeed in fooling the Republican officials charged with overseeing the accounts? Part of the answer to this question lies in the Republican government's woeful neglect of its embassy staff in Moscow. In brief, the Soviets were able to cavalierly overcharge the Republic because the Loyalists never appointed a military accountant to supervise the purchase of arms. But a fuller analysis of this question awaits future scholars.
The primary source for Howson's discussion of Soviet hardware supplied to the Republic is a set of Military Archive documents he received secondhand from a Spanish media outlet. While these documents appear to be authentic, and are used judiciously, they are the only Russian-language materials Howson cites. It is not clear why the author did not take the trouble to inspect the originals in the Military Archive or, for that matter, seek out supporting documentation from other declassified Russian institutions.
More than once, Howson falls part-way into the trap of other recent researchers who have neglected the possibilities of working in the Russian Federation. For example, on the subject of when and why Stalin made the decision to intervene, Howson asserts that:
Neither Stalin's private thoughts on the matter nor the minutes of Politburo meetings, assuming any were taken, have ever been published and all we have to go on are the memoirs of two NKVD officers who later defected. ₈₅
In fact, we have much more than this, not least the Politburo stenograms, declassified and available on the fifth floor of RGASPI. In addition, there are more reliable Russian memoirs of the war than the two Howson refers to (the above-discussed Orlov and Krivitsky accounts).	80
Working on a much smaller canvas, and limiting its purview to activities of Soviet armored units on the side of the Republic, is the groundbreaking article by Steven J. Zaloga in The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. ₈₆ Zaloga has exploited Red Army after-action reports to provide the first narrative history of Soviet tankers in the war. The author's general thesis is that tank performance in Spain was handicapped throughout the war by poor planning and support, and the perennial inability to coordinate combined infantry and armor operations. Underlying Zaloga's argument runs the theme of fundamental Soviet weakness and lack of preparation—a topic rarely touched upon in any accounts of the Soviet intervention.
Another in the recent crop of publications bears mentioning: Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Panné's contribution to the much-discussed edited volume The Black Book of Communism. ₈₇ The Black Book was originally published in France, where it immediately set off an impassioned public debate. The general thesis of this work of nearly 900 pages is that the eighty-year history of Communism should be read as a catalogue of "crimes and repression," a murderous assault on society by a series of violent and amoral dictators. The larger implication of The Black Book is that Communism was very much the equal of Nazism as a force of evil and destruction in the twentieth century. While the conclusions of the volume are quite convincing overall, one must question whether or not Comintern activities in Spain deserve to be presented as a case study alongside Stalin's forced collectivization and de-kulakization in the early 1930s, the Terror of 1936-38, the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1950s, or Pol Pot's reign of terror in the 1970s.
If the authors of the chapter on Spain are to be believed, the answer is a resounding Yes. Indeed, Courtois and Panné's study is an anti-Stalinist version of the war as polemical as the most excessive essays composed by post-war Republican exiles. It is interesting to observe that, even though The Black Book purports to incorporate major new documentary evidence from declassified Russian archives, in this chapter Courtois and Panné rely primarily on the testimonies of anti-Stalinist civil war participants. In fact, after repeatedly referring to half-century-old accounts of Spanish socialists, POUMists, or even the disputed Orlov and Krivitsky, the authors produce only a single new declassified document to support their conclusions. ₈₈ Otherwise, nearly all of their sources are in one way or another unreliable; at the very least, these accounts must be presented with an admission of their authors' ideological orientation.
At times, however, Courtois and Panné's zeal goes beyond the unflinching presentation of biased works. Take, for example, the following statement:
If General Walter Krivitsky, the chief of the NKVD's external forces in Western Europe, is to be believed, only 40 of the approximately 3,000 Soviet agents in Spain saw active service; the rest were advisers, politicians, or gatherers of intelligence. ₈₉	85
As should by now be evident from the above discussion of Krivitsky, it is at present impossible to determine what official position he held within the Soviet intelligence services. As we have seen, Orlov strongly disputed Krivitsky's claim to having been the "chief of NKVD operations in Western Europe." It is the height of scholarly irresponsibility for Courtois and Panné to allow Krivitsky's own unverifiable, self-aggrandizing claim to this title to stand unquestioned, or indeed, to use this official-sounding designation to lend credence to a exaggerated statement concerning the extent of Soviet activities in Spain.
As misleading as the authors' introduction to Krivitsky is, they then proceed to botch the quotation they ascribe to him (without including, let us observe, a proper reference marker and source citation). In Courtois and Panné's version of Krivitsky's assessment, the Kremlin sent 3000 Soviet agents to Spain, nearly all of whom were involved in the behind-the-scenes manipulation of the Republic's government and army. This statement carries with it the strong implication that the Soviet Union was not actively engaged in fighting on the side of the Republic, but rather in infiltrating and influencing the Republic's leadership. Ignoring for a moment whether or not the thrust of this version is supported by the evidence, it must be said that this view in no way reflects Krivitsky's own remarks on the subject. In his 1939 exposé, In Stalin's Secret Service, Krivitsky wrote that the
Soviet military personnel in Spain never reached more than 2000 men, and only pilots and tank officers saw active duty. Most of the Russians were technicians—general staff men, military instructors, engineers, specialists in setting up war industries, experts in chemical warfare, aviation mechanics, radio operators and gunnery experts. These Red Army men were segregated from the Spanish civilians as much as possible, housed apart and never permitted to associate in any way with Spanish political groups or figures. ₉₀
Courtois and Panné inexplicably inflate Krivitsky's estimate of the total number of Soviets in Spain by 1000 men, or one-third. In addition, they seem to invent the notion that only forty of these were directly involved in the war effort. By contrast, my research demonstrates that well over 1000 Soviet personnel served in Spain as pilots and tank crewmen. Further examination of Krivitsky's comments reveals a far different picture than that attributed to him in the Courtois and Panné interpretation. According to Krivitsky, the majority of Soviet personnel in Spain were not only closely involved in the military conflict, but were sent by Moscow for that purpose alone. Why else would they be deliberately separated from the civilian population, and especially the political parties, as Krivitsky claims? Of course, it is very difficult to take issue with the inclusion of this or that disputed source when the authors, in this case Courtois and Panné, make no effort to faithfully reproduce or cite the sources themselves. In sum, as important an event as the appearance of The Black Book is, the chapter on Spain is by a comfortable margin the weakest section in the volume.
Finally, Mary Habeck and Ronald Radosh's jointly authored work, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, is without a doubt the most important book to yet emerge in any language on the Soviet military intervention in Spain. ₉₁ The volume is primarily an annotated set of translated documents, mostly from the Military Archive, but also from RGASPI and a few other institutions. These eighty-one translated documents reveal a great deal about Soviet policy in Spain, and touch on numerous hitherto misunderstood or largely concealed topics: the work of the Soviet advisors on the various fronts of the war; Soviet intervention in Republican politics; the Comintern's organization of the International Brigades; Soviet intelligence and espionage activities in Spain; and the extent of NKVD operations in the Republic. A comparison of many of the original documents treated here and their English translations indicates that a great deal of care and attention to detail went into the entire enterprise.	90
One can expect that the reproduced documents will serve as a basis for many future reinterpretations of the civil war. For the most part, the overall thesis of this work is similar to the critical assessments of Araquistain, Bolloten, and others, who argue that Soviet intervention doomed the Republic's war effort, and that Stalin sought above all the establishment of a "People's Republic"-style satellite in the Western Mediterranean. The main shortcoming of Habeck and Radosh's thesis is that the bulk of their conclusions rest on Stalin's apparent intentions in Spain, rather than what he was able to put into effect. To advance this position, the authors neglect to acknowledge the principal theme running through all of the documents they cite: the striking degree of incompetence and ineffectuality in the entire Soviet operation, an adventure characterized far more by failure and ineptitude than success or omnipotent control. Questions of interpretation aside, the presentation of the documents themselves constitutes a genuine historiographic bombshell, a breakthrough with no parallel in over six decades of civil war studies. The Habeck and Radosh volume thus deserves the widest possible diffusion, and it is hoped that their efforts will encourage a vigorous debate on the meaning of these and other newly accessible materials.
Notes: Note 1: L. V. Ponomarieva, Sovietskaia istoricheskaia nauka ot XX k XXII s''ezdu Komunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza. Istoriia stran Zapadnoi Evropii i Amerikii (Moscow: Nauka, 1963), 210-16. Back. Note 2: M. T. Meshcheriakov, "Ispanskaia tema v rabotakh sovetskikh istorikov," Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR 5 (1965): 129-34. Back. Note 3: Ibid., 132. Back. Note 4: B. A. Kandel and E. A. Guterman, Istoriia zarubezhnikh stran (Bibliografiia russkikh bibliografii) (Moscow: Nauka, 1966). Back. Note 5: I. V. Sakharov and E. M. Teper, S internatsionalom (Moscow: Kniga, 1971). See also Teper's annotated bibliography, Rekomendatel'nyi ukazatel' literatury (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1979). Back. Note 6: L. M. Iurieva, Natsionalno-revolutsionnaia voina v Ispanii i mirovaia literatura (Moscow: Izdat. Nauka, 1973). Back. Note 7: E. L. Gluzhinskaia, "Sovetskie issledovaniia po istorii Ispanii (1917-1974)," Problemy Ispanskoi istorii (1975): 252-62. Back. Note 8: E. L. Gluzhinskaia, "Sovetskie issledovaniia po istorii Ispanii (1975-1982)," Problemy Ispanskoi istorii (1984): 273-85. Back. Note 9: S. P. Pozharskaia "Sovetskaia istoriografiia antifashistskoi voiny v Ispanii (1936-1939)," Novaia i noveishaia istoriia (1987): 201-11. Back. Note 10: Ibid., 203. Back. Note 11: M. V. Novikov, Grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 1936-1939. Bibliograficheskii ukazatel' istochnikov i literatury, izdannykh v SSSR v 1936-1991 (Iaroslav: Iaroslav gos. universitet, 1994); SSSR, Komintern i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 1936-1939 (Iaroslav: Iaroslav gos. universitet, 1995). Back. Note 12: Thirty years after the first document collections were published in the USSR, and nearly a decade since the archive doors in post-Soviet Russia were flung open, many Western scholars of the Spanish Civil War still persist in maintaining, quite erroneously, that no Soviet-era primary materials on the subject are available. In Michael Alpert, A New International History of the Spanish Civil War (London: St. Martin's, 1994), the British specialist of the civil war wrote that, "[o]n the USSR there is no work which quotes original material" (187). As recently as 1998, Francisco Olaya Morales, in El Oro de Negrin (Madrid: Nossa y Jara, 1998), commenting on Soviet activities in Spain, wrote that everything "will remain hypothetical and it will be impossible to know the precise truth as long as the Russian archives ... are closed to researchers" (420). Back. Note 13: SSSR i fashistskaia agressiia v Ispanii: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1937); Dela Ispanii ni chastno dela ispantsev (Moscow, 1937). Back. Note 14: Vneshniaia politika SSSR: Sbornik dokumentov (1936-1943), Vol. IV (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1946). Back. Note 15: Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, vols. XIX-XXI (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1974-77). Back. Note 16: K. K. Shirinia, ed., VII Kongress Kommunisticheskogo Internatsionala i bor'ba protiv fashizma i voiny (Sbornik dokumentov) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1975), 440-65. Back. Note 17: Dolores Ibárruri, et al., Voina i revoliutsiia v Ispanii, 1936-1939, 4 vols. (Moscow: Progreso, 1966-71). Back. Note 18: Internatsional'naia solidarnost trudiiashikhsia zapadnoukrainskikh zemel s respublikanskoi Ispaniei: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Kiev, 1988). Back. Note 19: Novikov, SSSR, Komintern i grazhdanskaia voina, 28. Back. Note 20: Ibid. Such misgivings are not limited to Soviet primary accounts. It should be remembered that nearly all Western European and North American memoirs are also notoriously flawed. Back. Note 21: Mikhail Kol'tsov, Ispanskii dnevnik (Moscow: Khodozhestvennaia literatura, 1938). Back. Note 22: Mikhail Kol'tsov, Ispanskii dnevnik (Moscow: Sov. pisatel', 1957). Back. Note 23: Mikhail Kol'tsov, Ispanskii dnevnik: Ispaniia v ognia, ed. E. M. Tiper, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd-vo politicheskoi literatury, 1987). Back. Note 24: Ilia Erenburg, Lyudi, gody, zhizn' (Moscow: Sov. pisatel', 1990). An English translation has been published in four separate volumes, the second of which covers the war: Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921-1941, trans. Tatiana Shebunina and Yvonne Kapp (London: MacGibbon, 1963). Back. Note 25: Ilya Ehrenburg, Ispanskie reportazhi (Moscow: Izd-vo Agenstva pechati Novosti, 1986). This work has never appeared in English, though a Spanish translation of a much older French version has just been issued: Corresponsal en España, trans. Javier Pérez (Barcelona: Editorial Prensa Ibérica, 1998). Back. Note 26: For the most complete list of Soviet memoirs, see Novikov, SSSR i Grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii, 18-38. Back. Note 27: Ivan M. Maiskii, ed., Iz istorii osvoboditel'noi voiny ispanskogo naroda (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1959). Back. Note 28: Ivan M. Maiskii, ed. Ispanskii narod protiv fashizma, 1936-1939 gg.; sbornik statei (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1963). Back. Note 29: Ivan M. Maiskii, Ispanskii tetrady (Moscow: Voennoe izdat., 1962). In English this first appeared as Spanish Notebooks, trans. Ruth Kisch (London: Hutchinson, 1966). Back. Note 30: Ivan M. Maiskii, N. N. Voronov, and I. N. Nesterenko, eds., Pod znamenem ispanskoi respubliki: Vospominaniia sovetskikh dobrovol'tsev-uchastnikov natsional'no-revoliutsionnoi voiny v Ispanii, 1936-1939 (Moscow: Izdat. Nauka, 1965). This work was one of the few primary Soviet accounts of the war to be published by Moscow in a Spanish translation: Bajo la bandera de la España Republicana (Moscow: Progreso, 1965). Contributors included Batov, Krivoshein, Nestorenko, Rodimstev, Voronov, Malinovskii, Iakushin, Prokof'ev, and Mezentsev. Back. Note 31: D. V. Pritsker, ed., Leningradtsy v Ispanii, 3rd ed. (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1989). Back. Note 32: L. L. Gorilovskogo, ed., Vmeste s patriotami Ispanii: vospominaniia uchastnikov natsional'no-revoliutsionnoi voiny ispanskogo naroda (Kiev: Izd-vo polit. lit-ry Ukrainy, 1986). My internatsionalisty, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Izdat. Politicheskoi Literatury, 1986). Back. Note 33: N. G. Kuznetsov, Nakanune (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1969), 183. Significantly, the passage referring to the recalled diplomats was deleted in the posthumously edited volume Memoirs of Wartime Minister of the Navy (Moscow: Progress, 1990), 74. Back. Note 34: Roman Karmen, No Pasaran! (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1972). Back. Note 35: Ovadii Savich, Dva goda v Ispanii, 1937-1939 (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel', 1981). Back. Note 36: Adelina and Paulina Abramson, Mosaico Roto (Madrid: Compañia Literaria, 1995). Back. Note 37: Walter G. Krivitsky, In Stalin's Secret Service (New York: Harper, 1939), 75. Back. Note 38: Alexander Orlov, "Answers to the Questionnaire of Prof. S. G. Payne" (unpublished, 1968), 2. Back. Note 39: Krivitsky, In Stalin's Secret Service, 95. Back. Note 40: V. V. Kuleshova, Ispaniia i SSSR: Kulturnye sviazi: 1917-1939 (Moscow: Izdat. Nauka, 1975). Back. Note 41: Afanasii Arsen'evich Komshukov, "Natsional'no-revoliutsionnaia voina ispanskogo naroda 1936-1939 gg. i sovetskaia obshchestvennost'," Ph.D. diss. (Kharkov, 1979). Back. Note 42: Among the only important works to emerge from Soviet scholars in the decade of the 1980s was M. T. Meshcheriakov, Ispanskaia respublika i Komintern (Moscow: Mysl', 1981). Meshcheriakov's work was the first to make use of the Party archive, now RGASPI, though his conclusions -very much a product of the time—cast the Moscow-based organization in far too charitable a light. Meshcheriakov's conclusions have largely been superseded by the more recent work of Elorza and Bizcarrondo, discussed below. Back. Note 43: V. A. Tolmachaev, "Sovetskii Soyuz i Ispaniia: Opyt i uroki internatsional'noi pomoshchi (1936-1939)," Ph.D. diss. (Leningrad, 1991). Back. Note 44: Ibid., 140. Back. Note 45:Iurii E. Ribalkin, "Voennaia pomoshch' Sovietskogo Soyuza Ispanskomu narodu v natsional'no-revoliutsionnoi voine 1936-1939," Ph.D. diss. (Institute of Military History, Moscow, 1992); and Operatsiia "X": Sovetskaia voennaia pomoshch' respublikanskoi Ispanii (1936-1939) (Moscow: "AIRO-XX", 2000). Curiously, well into the post-Soviet transition period, Ribalkin's dissertation was considered a restricted work containing matters related to Russian national security. I required considerable institutional assistance to finally view it in 1996. Back. Note 46: M. V. Novikov, SSSR, Komintern i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii 1936-1939, 2 vols. (Iaroslav: Iaroslav gosud. universitet, 1995). Back. Note 47: Oleg Sarin and Lev Dvoretsky, Alien Wars: The Soviet Union's Aggressions Against the World, 1919-1989 (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1996). Sarin, it might be noted, is the former editor of the Soviet armed forces daily Red Star, while Dvoretsky is a military journalist and historian. Back. Note 48: Indeed, two of the main Western accounts of the 1950s, namely the Allen and Plumb dissertations, are primarily concerned with refuting the Nationalist-advanced thesis that the July uprising was a response to Soviet intervention in Spanish affairs. These works are discussed in detail below. Back. Note 49: Dolores Ibárruri, et. al., Guerra y revolución en España 1936-1939, 4 vols. (Moscow: Progreso, 1966). Back. Note 50: The subject merits only once sentence in the discussion of the fall of the northern front. See ibid., vol. III, 259. Back. Note 51: Alba's books are too numerous to mention, though special attention should be drawn to Historia del POUM (Paris: Champ Libre, 1975); and El marxismo en España: 1919-1939: Historia del BOC y del POUM, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Costa-Amic, 1973). Back. Note 52: Among Araquistain's publications, all of which repeat the same allegations, are "La intervención de Rusia en la guerra civil española," Cuadernos 24 (1958); La intervención de Rusia en el conflicto Español; Revelaciones de un Ex-Embajador de la Republica Española (San José, Costa Rica, 1939); and El comunismo y la guerra de España (San José, Costa Rica, 1939). Back. Note 53: Luis Araquistain, "La intervención de Rusia," 3. Back. Note 54: Ibid., 3-7. Back. Note 55: Ibid., 8. Back. Note 56: Claude G. Bowers, My Mission to Spain: Watching the Rehearsal for World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 315. The emphasis is Bowers'. Back. Note 57: See Juan García Durán, "El hundamiento del 'Komsomol,'" Tiempo de Historia 3:34 (Sept. 1977): 34-37; and "Por qué y cómo interveno Rusia en la guerra civil española," Tiempo de Historia 5:51 (Feb. 1979):10-25. Back. Note 58: Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, 21 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1977). Back. Note 59: Ricardo de la Cierva, Brigadas Internacionales, 1936-1996: La verdadera historia: Mentira histórica y error de Estado (Madrid: Editorial Fénix, 1997); Francisco Olaya Morales, El Oro de Negrín, 2nd ed. rev. (Madrid: Nossa y Jara, 1998); and La intervención extranjera en la guerra civil (Móstoles: Ediciones Madre Tierra, 1990). Back. Note 60: De la Cierva, Brigadas Internacionales, 461. Back. Note 61: Olaya Morales, La intervención extranjera en la guerra civil, 420. Back. Note 62: See Angel Viñas, El oro español en la guerra civil (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales. Ministerio de Hacienda, 1976); and El oro de Moscú: Alfa y omega de un mito franquista (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1979). Also, see the same author's more concise, "Gold, the Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War," European Studies Review 9 (1979): 105-128. Back. Note 63: Enrique Zafra, Rosalía Crego, and Carmen Heredia, Los niños españoles evacuados a la URSS (1937) (Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1989). Back. Note 64: Antonio San Román Sevillano, "Los amigos de la Unión Soviética: Propaganda política en España (1933-1938)," Ph.D. diss. (Universidad de Salamanca, 1993). Back. Note 65: Juan Avilés Farré, La fe que vino de rusia: La revolución bolchevique y los españoles (1917-1931) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1999). Back. Note 66: José Fernández Sánchez, Rusos en el Frente del Norte (1937) (Gijón: Ateneo Obrero de Gijón, 1996). For additional titles by the author, see the bibliography at the end of this volume. Back. Note 67: See Cesar Vidal, Las brigadas internacionales (Madrid: Espasa Calpa, 1998). Back. Note 68: See Antonio Elorza and Marta Bizcarrondo, Queridos Camaradas: La Internacional Comunista y España, 1919-1939 (Barcelona: Planeta, 1999). Back. Note 69: David Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955). Back. Note 70: David Cattell, Soviet Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 132. Back. Note 71: Robert L. Plumb, "Soviet Participation in the Spanish Civil War," Ph.D. diss. (Georgetown, 1956); David E. Allen, "The Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939," Ph.D. diss. (Stanford, 1952). Back. Note 72: Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-1939 (New York: St. Martin's, 1984); Jiri Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). Back. Note 73: Peter B. Kaufman, "Soviet Attitudes Towards Collective Security in Europe, 1936-38," Russian History 15:2-4 (1988): 427-44. Back. Note 74: Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 172. Back. Note 75: Denis Smyth, "'We are with you': Solidarity and Self-interest in Soviet Policy Towards Republican Spain, 1936-1939," in Radicals, Rebels and Establishments, ed. Patrick J. Corish (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1985), 223-37. Back. Note 76: Geoffrey Roberts, "Soviet Foreign Policy and the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939," in Spain in an International Context, 1936-1959, ed. Christian Leitz and David J. Dunthorn (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 81-103. Back. Note 77: See ibid., 96. Back. Note 78: Ibid., 89. Back. Note 79: Only the last and most comprehensive need concern us here: Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Back. Note 80: John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier Reveals Stalin's Master Spy (New York: Crown, 1993). Back. Note 81: R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 99. Back. Note 82: Costello and Tsarev, Deadly Illusions, 257. Back. Note 83: Ibid. Back. Note 84: Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Murray, 1998). Back. Note 85: Ibid., 124. Back. Note 86: Steven J. Zaloga, "Soviet Tank Operations in the Spanish Civil War," Journal of Slavic Military Studies 12:3 (Sept. 1999): 134-62. Back. Note 87: Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Panné, "The Shadow of the NKVD in Spain," in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Stéphane Courtois et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Back. Note 88: This is a RGASPI document from the archives of the International Brigades. See Courtois and Panné, "The Shadow of the NKVD," 784. Back. Note 89: Ibid., 337. Back. Note 90: Krivitsky, In Stalin's Secret Service, 95. Back. Note 91: Mary Habeck and Ronald Radosh, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Back. Stalin and the Spanish Civil War