Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War.

On the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Mike Makin-Waite surveys the history of the communist movement, tracking its origins in the Enlightenment, and through nineteenth-century socialism to the emergence of Marxism and beyond. As we emerge from the long winter of neoliberalism, and the search is on for ideas that can help shape a contemporary popular socialism, some of the questions that have preoccupied socialist thinkers throughout left history are once more being debated. Should the left press for reform and work through the state or should it focus on protest and a critique of the whole system? Is it possible to expand the liberal idea of democracy to include economic democracy? Which alliances require too great a compromise and which can help secure future change? Arguments on questions such as these have been raging since the mid-nineteenth century, and were the basis of the split between Social Democrats and Communists in the aftermath of the First World War. Mike Makin-Waite believes that revisiting these debates can help us to avoid some of the mistakes made in the past, and find new solutions to some of these age-old concerns. His argument is that the democratic and liberal counter-currents that have always existed within the communist movement have much to offer the left project today. This unorthodox account therefore tracks an alternative history that includes nineteenth-century revisionists such as Karl Kautsky, Menshevik opponents of Bolshevik oppression in 1917, Popular Front critiques of sectarianism in the 1930s, communist support for 1968's Prague Spring, and the turn to Gramsci and Eurocommunism in the 1970s. The aim of Communism and Democracy: history, debates and potentials is to recover some of the hard-won insights of the critical communist tradition, in the belief that they can still be of service to the twenty-first-century left.

The Tree of Gernika: a Field Study of Modern War was published in 1938. It is G. L. Steer's masterpiece. Martha Gellhorn famously wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt:

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""'You must read a book by a man names Steer: it is called The Tree of Gernika. It is about the fight of the Basques - he's the London Times man - and no better book has come out of the war and he says well all the things I have tried to say to you the times I saw you, after Spain. It is beautifully written and true, and few books are like that, and fewer still deal with war. Pleas get it.'

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""As Paul Preston says in his "We Saw Spain Die," 'Martha Gellhorn's judgement has more than stood the test of time.'

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""In his introduction, Nick Rankin writes.' "The Tree of Gernika" tells how Euzkadi, the democratic republic that the Basques created in their green homeland by the Bay of Biscay, fought for freedom and decency in an atrocious civil war. After a year of struggle, blockaded by sea, bombed from the air, fighting against overwhelming odds in their own hill, the Basques in the end lost to Franco's forces - but they lost honourably, without resorting to murder, torture and treachery.'

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""It was Steer who alerted the world to the destruction of Gernika (Basque spelling), Guernica (Spanish spelling). It was the most important dispatch of his life, run by both "The Times "and "The New York Times."

Nick Rankin rightly describes "The Tree of Gernika" as 'a masterpiece of narrative history and eyewitness reporting by someone close to the key events . . .'

The terrible months between the arrival of the Red Army on German soil and the final collapse of Hitler's regime were like no other in the Second World War. The Soviet Army's intent to take revenge for the horror that the Nazis had wreaked on their people produced a conflict of implacable brutality in which millions perished.
From the great battles that marked the Soviet conquest of East and West Prussia to the final surrender in the Vistula estuary, this book recounts in chilling detail the desperate struggle of soldiers and civilians alike. These brutal campaigns are brought vividly to life by a combination of previously unseen testimony and astute strategic analysis recognising a conflict of unprecedented horror and suffering.
Hardcover edition ISBN: 9781849081900

In this revised edition of A Short History of the Spanish Civil War, Julian Casanova tells the gripping story of the Spanish Civil War. Written in elegant and accessible prose, the book charts the most significant events and battles alongside the main players in the tragedy. Casanova provides answers to some of the pressing questions (such as the roots and extent of anticlerical violence) that have been asked in the 70 years that have passed since the painful defeat of the Second Republic. Now with a revised introduction, Casanova offers an overview of recent historiographical shifts; not least the wielding of the conflict to political ends in certain strands of contemporary historiography towards an alarming neo- Francoist revisionism. It is the ideal introduction to the Spanish Civil War.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, began a war that lasted nearly four years and created by far the bloodiest theater in World War II. In the conventional narrative of this war, Hitler was defeated by Stalin because, like Napoleon, he underestimated the size and resources of his enemy. In fact, says historian John Mosier, Hitler came very close to winning and lost only because of the intervention of the western Allies. Stalin's great triumph was not winning the war, but establishing the prevailing interpretation of the war. The Great Patriotic War, as it is known in Russia, would eventually prove fatal, setting in motion events that would culminate in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Deathride "argues that the Soviet losses in World War II were unsustainable and would eventually have led to defeat. The Soviet Union had only twice the population of Germany at the time, but it was suffering a casualty rate more than two and a half times the German rate. Because Stalin had a notorious habit of imprisoning or killing anyone who brought him bad news (and often their families as well), Soviet battlefield reports were fantasies, and the battle plans Soviet generals developed seldom responded to actual circumstances. In this respect the Soviets waged war as they did everything else: through propaganda rather than actual achievement. What saved Stalin was the Allied decision to open the Mediterranean theater. Once the Allies threatened Italy, Hitler was forced to withdraw his best troops from the eastern front and redeploy them. In addition, the Allies provided heavy vehicles that the Soviets desperately needed and were unable to manufacture themselves. It was not the resources of the Soviet Union that defeated Hitler but the resources of the West.
In this provocative revisionist analysis of the war between Hitler and Stalin, Mosier provides a dramatic, vigorous narrative of events as he shows how most previous histories accepted Stalin's lies and distortions to produce a false sense of Soviet triumph. "Deathride "is the real story of the Eastern Front, fresh and different from what we thought we knew.

During the first few days of the Spanish Civil War, women played an integral role in the spontaneous uprising that prevented the immediate success of the Nationalist coup. Around one thousand of these women went on to join the militias who fought at the front. Women also played an important role in the defense of cities, with another several thousand forming sections of the armed rearguard. Indeed, women s participation in the anti-fascist resistance constituted one of the greatest mass political mobilizations of women in Spain s history. Milicianas provides a comprehensive picture of what life was like for the women who fought during the first year of the civil war, focusing on how the women themselves viewed this experience. It demonstrates that the significance of the miliciana phenomenon lies in the fact that these women took up arms in relatively large numbers, were self-motivated, participated in combat equally with their male comrades, and played an extensive and sophisticated military role. By late 1936, attitudes towards women in combat began to change drastically, and by March 1937, the majority of milicianas had been removed from their combat positions. Though there existed a consensus around this issue among the male leadership of both the Republican government and left-wing political groups, female combatants viewed this turn of events differently. The majority of the milicianas had deep reservations about their recall from the front, and saw it as a retreat from the gains women had made during the war and revolution. Indeed, while the political leadership within the Republic presented numerous arguments for why it was necessary to remove women from combat, this book argues that the reason it was initially considered acceptable for women to fight, and then seen as undesirable eight months later, was connected to the course of the social revolution.

The Spanish Civil War left a legacy of destruction, resentment and deep ideological divisions in a country that was attempting to recover from economic stagnation and social inequality. After Franco's victory, the repression and purge that ensued immersed Spain in a spiral of fear and silence which continued long after the dictator's death, through 'the pact of oblivion' that was observed during the transition to democracy. Memories of the Spanish Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain attempts to break this silence by recovering the local memories of survivors of the Civil War and the early years of Franco's dictatorship. Combining oral testimony gathered in one Andalusian village, with archival research, this ethnographic study approaches the expression of memory as an important site of socio-political struggle.

This narrative history tells the story of the German occupation of Normandy (1940-44), and the Allied liberation. Following the fall of France in 1940, Normandy formed part of the Reich's western border and its history for the next four years. On the coast, vast defenses were built up, and large numbers of German troops were stationed throughout the region, all in the midst of the local population. Much of the story is told in the words of French, German, and Allied participants, including last letters of executed hostages and resisters, accounts of everyday life and eyewitness reports of aerial, naval, and ground combat operations during the Liberation. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, all were witness to the greatest amphibious landing in history. This, then, is the story of the 51-month-nightmare that was Normandy's war, told while it is still possible to record the personal stories of survivors, which very soon will not be the case.

Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his country - forever changed. Together with his sister-in-law, he is forced out of his beloved Barcelona and into exile in Chile. There, they find themselves enmeshed in a rich web of characters who come together in love and tragedy over the course of four generations, destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world.

"Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War" discusses the participation of volunteers of Jewish descent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. It focuses in particular on the establishment of the Naftali Botwin Company, a Jewish military unit that was created in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade. Its formation and short-lived history on the battlefield were closely connected to the activities and propaganda of Yiddish-speaking Jewish migrant communists in Paris who described Jewish volunteers as 'Chosen Fighters of the Jewish People' in their daily newspaper "Naye Prese."Gerben Zaagsma analyses the symbolic meaning of the participation of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company both during and after the civil war. He puts this participation in the broader context of Jewish involvement in the left and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the communist movement and beyond. To this end, the book examines representations of Jewish volunteers in the Parisian Yiddish press (both communist and non-communist). In addition it analyses the various ways in which Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company have been commemorated after WWII, tracing how discourses about Jewish volunteers became decisively shaped by post-Holocaust debates on Jewish responses to fascism and Nazism, and discusses claims that Jewish volunteers can be seen as 'the first Jews to resist Hitler with arms'.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 This book provides a comparative history of the domestic and international nature of Spain's First Carlist War (1833-40) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), as well as the impact of both conflicts. The book demonstrates how and why Spain's struggle for liberty was won in the 1830s only for it to be lost one hundred years later. It shows how both civil wars were world wars in miniature, fought in part by foreign volunteers under the gaze and in the political consciousness of the outside world. Prefaced by a short introduction, The Spanish Civil Wars is arranged into two domestic and international sections, each with three thematic chapters comparing each civil war in detail. The main analytical perspectives are political, social and new military history in nature, but they also explore aspects of gender, culture, nationalism and separatism, economy, religion and, especially, the war in its international context. The book integrates international archival research with the latest scholarship on both subjects and also includes a glossary, a bibliography and several images. It is a key resource tailored to the needs of students and scholars of modern Spain which offers an intriguing and original new perspective on the Spanish Civil War.

This book focuses on the short but crucial period that led to the collapse of the Spanish Republic and set the stage for the ensuing civil war. Stanley G. Payne, an internationally known scholar of modern Spanish history, details the political shifts that occurred from 1933 to 1936 and examines the actions and inactions of key actors during these years. Using their own memoirs, speeches, and declarations, he challenges previous perceptions of various major players, including President Alcalá Zamora.   The breakdown of political coalitions and the internal rifts between Spain’s bourgeois and labor classes sparked many instances of violent dissent in the mid-1930s. The book addresses the election of 1933 and the destabilizing insurrection that followed, Alcalá Zamora's failed attempts to control the major parties, and the backlash that resulted.  The alliances of the socialist left with communism and the right with fascism are also explored, as is the role of forces outside Spain in spurring the violence that eventually exploded into war.    

This book reflects on the new histories emerging from the exhumation of mass graves that contain the corpses of the Republicans killed in extrajudicial executions during and after the conflict, nearly eighty years after the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In the search for, location and unearthing of these unmarked burials, the corpse, the document and the oral testimony have become key traces through which to demand the recognition of past Francoist crimes, which were never atoned, from a lukewarm Spanish state and judiciary. These have become objects of evidence against the politics of silence entertained by national institutions since the transition to democracy. Working alongside archaeologists, historians, memory activists and families, this book explores how new versions of the history of the killings are constructed at the cross-roads between science, history and family experience. It does so considering the workings of truth-seeking in the absence of criminal justice and the effects of the process on Spanish collective memory and identity.

This book explores the attitudes of the Spanish army officer corps towards the evolution of warfare during the early decades of the twentieth century, and their influence on the armies of the Spanish Civil War. It examines how the Spanish military coped with technological innovations such as the machine gun and the tank, how it adapted the armys battlefield doctrine to changes in warfare before the Civil War, and the influence of this doctrine on the outcome of the conflict. Of the different armed forces that fought in the Spanish Civil War, it is paradoxically the Spanish army that remains most forgotten - especially its military doctrine. Scholarship on the Spanish military in this period focuses on its politics, ideology and institutional reforms, touching upon 'hard' professional issues only superficially, if at all. Based on original research and using largely unstudied Spanish primary sources, this book fills a major scholarly gap in the history of the Spanish army and the Spanish Civil War.

Through case studies of prominent cultural products, this book takes a longitudinal approach to the influence and conceptualization of the Civil War in democratic Spain. Stafford explores the stories told about the war during the transition to democracy and how these narratives have morphed in light of the polemics about historical memory.

International Communism and the Spanish Civil War provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Exploring the transnational exchanges that occurred in Soviet-structured spaces - from clandestine schools for training international revolutionaries in Moscow to the International Brigades in Spain - the book uncovers complex webs of interaction, at once personal and political, that linked international communists to one another and the Soviet Union. The Spanish Civil War, which coincided with the great purges in the Soviet Union, stands at the center of this grassroots history. For many international communists, the war came to define both their life histories and political commitments. In telling their individual stories, the book calls attention to a central paradox of Stalinism - the simultaneous celebration and suspicion of transnational interactions - and illuminates the appeal of a cause that promised solidarity even as it practiced terror.

Film, Memory and the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War reconstructs the legacy of the Spanish Civil War through an investigation of the anti-Franco guerrilla of the 1940s and 1950s. The book explores the memory of Spanish resistance fighters and their civilian supporters, concentrating on their cinematic representations in films and documentaries released between 1953 and 2010. This research fits within the emerging comparative field of Memory Studies, which has grown considerably in the last two decades. Along those lines, the efforts of civil society to understand and come to terms with the past have gathered momentum in twenty-first century Spain. One visible outcome of this determination has been the recovery of corpses from unmarked graves, which has been accompanied by a renewed interest in the cultural, historical, legal and archaeological traces of the millions who suffered under Franco's protracted dictatorship. This book sheds light especially on the silent roles played by women and children in the struggle against fascism.

This book focuses on an important but neglected aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the evolution of medical and surgical care of the wounded during the conflict. Importantly, the focus is from a mainly Spanish perspective - as the Spanish are given a voice in their own story, which has not always been the case. Central to the book is General Franco's treatment of Muslim combatants, the anarchist contribution to health, and the medicalisation of propaganda - themes that come together in a medico-cultural study of the Spanish Civil War. Suffusing the narrative and the analysis is the traumatic legacy of conflict, an untreated wound that a new generation of Spaniards are struggling to heal.

This book presents an original new history of the most important conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, prior to the events that produced World War II the Spanish Civil War. It describes the complex origins of the conflict, the collapse of the Spanish Republic, and the outbreak of the only mass worker revolution in the history of Western Europe. Stanley Payne explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the complex web of republican politics, while also examining in detail the development of Franco's counterrevolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines why the conflict provoked such strong reactions in its own time, and long after. The book also explains the military history of the war and its place in the history of military development, the non-intervention policy of the democracies, and the role of German, Italian, and Soviet intervention, concluding with an analysis of the place of the war in European affairs and in comparative perspective of revolutionary civil wars of the twentieth century."

This book examines the internal controversies of the Roosevelt Administration in connection with Spain during World War II, the role of the President in these controversies, and the foundations of the policy that was followed from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until the launching of Operation Torch in 1942.

This original analysis of the workings of Soviet state security organs under Lenin and Stalin addresses a series of questions that have long resisted satisfactory answers. Why did political repression affect so many people, most of them ordinary citizens? Why did repression come in waves or cycles? Why were economic and petty crimes regarded as political crimes? What was the reason for relying on extra-judicial tribunals? And what motivated the extreme harshness of punishments, including the widespread use of the death penalty? Through an approach that synthesizes history and economics, Paul Gregory develops systematic explanations for the way terror was applied, how terror agents were recruited, how they carried out their jobs, and how they were motivated. The book draws on extensive, recently opened archives of the Gulag administration, the Politburo, and state security agencies themselves to illuminate in new ways terror and repression in the Soviet Union as well as dictatorships in other times and places.

Introduction by Paul Preston with a foreword by Rodney Bickerstaffe This scrapbook, kept by a 17-year-old children's nurse in South Yorkshire, offers an insight into the political and emotional impact that the Spanish Civil War had on a generation who lived through the agonising defeat of the Spanish Republic. Elizabeth Pearl Bickerstaffe's cuttings reveal the extent of human suffering in the war in Spain - and likewise in China - in which civilians were the main casualties. They also tell of the vain efforts in Britain and by the International Brigade volunteers in Spain itself to prevent this latest triumph for the fascist powers in Europe. And we sense the fierce commitment to the cause of the Spanish Republic felt by the newspaper correspondents and photographers who witnessed this unfolding tragedy. The role of the foreign correspondents in Spain is discussed in an introduction by Paul Preston, the foremost historian of the Spanish Civil War. In his foreword, Rodney Bickerstaffe underlines the important part played both by the events in Spain and by his mother's scrapbook in shaping his political values. This point is amplified in Jim Jump's preface explaining more about the creation, context and consequences of Pearl Bickerstaffe's compelling scrapbook of one of the major episodes in twentieth-century history.

Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War is a history of art during wartime that analyzes images in various media that circulated widely and were encountered daily by Spaniards on city walls, in print, and in exhibitions. Tangible elements of the nation's past"monuments, cultural property, and art-historical icons"were displayed in temporary exhibitions and museums, as well as reproduced on posters and in print media, to rally the population, define national identity, and reinvent distant and recent history. Artists, political-party propagandists, and government administrators believed that images on the street, in print, and in exhibitions would create a community of viewers, brought together during the staging of public exhibitions to understand their own roles as Spaniards. This book draws on extensive archival research, brings to light unpublished documents, and examines visual propaganda, exhibitions, and texts unavailable in English. It engages with questions of national self-definition and historical memory at their intersections with the fine arts, visual culture, exhibition history, tourism, and propaganda during the Spanish Civil War and immediate post-war period, as well as contemporary responses to the contested legacy of the Spanish Civil War. It will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual and cultural history, history, and museum studies.

Through the eyes of a young American female radical socialist, living and working in Barcelona during the Catalan Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the dreams, the nightmares and the realities of European politics in the age of dictatorship are fully brought to life. An autobiographical commentary written on the eve of World War Two.