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 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.

A NATION TORN APART BY WAR. ONE WOMAN STEPS INTO THE CROSSFIRE. _____________________________ 'This amazing book has everything in it: love, war, history and relevance to today. Gripping.' Russell Kane 'I insist you read this intelligent empathetic novel. You won't regret it.' Frost Magazine 'Extraordinary events sensitively told.' Lucy Jago, A Net For Small Fishes 'I couldn't put it down.' Gill Paul, The Collector's Daughter 'A heartrending tale of love, courage and sacrifice.' Nikki Marmery, On Wilder Seas ____________ 1936. Civil war in Spain. A world on the brink of chaos ... Twenty-one-year-old Lucy is frustrated with her constrained life in Hertfordshire, teaching and keeping house for her domineering father. But she is happy to be living next door to Tom and Jamie, two brothers she has known since childhood, and whom she loves equally. But her life is turned upside down when Tom decides he must travel to Spain to fight in the bloody Spanish Civil War. He is quickly followed by Jamie who, much to Lucy's despair, is supporting General Franco. To the dismay of her irascible father, Lucy decides that the only way to bring her boys back safely is to travel to Spain herself to persuade them to come home. Yet when she sees the horrific effects of the war, she quickly becomes immersed in the lifesaving work the Quakers are doing to help the civilian population, many of whom are refugees. As the war progresses and the situation becomes increasingly perilous, Lucy realises that the challenge going forward is not so much which brother she will end up with, but whether any of them will survive the carnage long enough to decide ... ____________ More praise for Acts of Love and War ... 'Be prepared to lose your heart in the simmering heat of war-torn Spain.' Miranda Malins, The Puritan Princess 'This is a marvellous book on any level, I thoroughly enjoyed it and could hardly put it down.' Deborahjs 'Wide in scope and told with honesty, insight and tenderness, a moving and unputdownable story' Judith Allnatt, The Poet's Wife 'Accomplished and expansive' Anne Morgan, Reading The World 'Insightful and moving' Katherine Clements, The Crimson Ribbon 'One of historical fiction's most lyrical and intelligent voices' Rachel McMillan, The London Restoration 'Emotionally captivating and authentic ... an unforgettable story' Susan Meissner, The Nature of Fragile Things _______________ Readers can't get enough of Acts of Love and War ... ***** 'A tale of passion and passionate caring, and how that can manifest in very different ways.' ***** 'A masterpiece.' ***** 'Highly recommended if you enjoy historical fiction.' ***** 'An amazing and compelling read.' ***** 'An immersive and powerful story.'

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.

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

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.

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.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Merce Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish 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.

The memoir of Sam Russell (1915-2010), a communist journalist and a British volunteer with the anti-fascist Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. First-hand accounts of significant historical events, from the formerly occupied Channel Islands at the end of World War II to the show trials of communists in Eastern Europe in the 1950s. Fascinating insight into the Spanish Civil War, the history of communism, and British radical history.

'A real treasure that we can't stop exploring' - La Republica Felicia Browne decided it was time to put down her paintbrushes and pick up a rifle. Jimmy Yates left Chicago with three books in his bindle, sacrificing them all on the gruelling trek across the Pyrenees. Salaria Kea worked at the front as a nurse, judged by her skill rather than her skin colour... In 1936 something extraordinary happened. As the threat of fascism swept across the Iberian peninsula, thousands of people from all over the world left their families and jobs to heed the call - No Pasaran! History has never seen a wave of solidarity like it. The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the Republic crushed, but the revolutionary dream of the International Brigades has never burnt out. Through these 60 illustrated profiles, Brigadistes embroiders an epic story of political struggle with the everyday bravery, sorrow and love of those who lived it.

Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco's Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance-a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism. In Hitler's Shadow Empire Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions-not ideology-drove Hitler's Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories. "The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published...Hitler's Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different. -Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard

More than 2500 volunteers took the extraordinary decision to risk their lives in a foreign war, and more than 500 of them died. The book looks at their role in the key battles in Spain, including the heroic work of the medical volunteers. Drawing on contemporary photographs and images, Antifascistas documents the artistic and historical legacy of the International Brigades, and demonstrates the idealism, commitment and sacrifice of these exceptional men and women.

This work covers the international importance of the War in Spain through the two organizations that marked the multilateral action towards the conflict: The League of Nations and the Non-Intervention Committee. France and the United Kingdom diverted both deliberations as well as decision-making processes and mechanisms from Geneva. Non-intervention was appeasement's specific variable applied to Spain. Despite its name, it meant an intervention, depriving the Spanish government from its own defense while the fascist governments provided massive and regular support to the rebels. The League was damaged in its authority through the violation of its Covenant in Manchuria and Abyssinia. Once the War in Spain began, non-intervention was articulated with the main objective to confine the conflict to the Spanish borders. To this end, the designation of the conflict as a civil war (not a mere nominal nor anecdotal issue) in both London and Geneva was essential. By abandoning the Spanish democracy and foreclosing the collective security system, European democracies were also removing all that stood between their own societies and another world war. The failure of the collective security system that the League was supposed to safeguard, prompted by the impossibility of reconciling the British-led policy of appeasement with active anti-fascism, led to a climate of collective insecurity, during which arose a Second World War. This was precisely the main objective to avoid in the international order established in 1919 after the major collective catastrophe on a worldwide scale - soon to be overcome as that. The scholarship herein will prove essential for scholars of the interwar years' crisis, twentieth-century Spanish history and international relations.

Tartan Angels sheds light on the work of the Scottish Ambulance Unit (SAU) and the crucial part it played in British medical and humanitarian aid to Spain. In the eighty-five years since the outbreak of the civil war an immense historiography has developed. A steady widening of focus has seen the inclusion of studies that address the intense and prolonged suffering of a civilian population affected by political repression, relentless military bombardment, deprivation, and disease. Likewise, focus has shifted to those who provided assistance to victims during and after the conflict. To date, academic emphasis has been on the left-wing politics behind such endeavours, with too little attention given to the humanitarian responses themselves. Tartan Angels embraces this argument in its focus on the Scottish Ambulance Unit, an enterprise that was arguably apolitical in nature and comprised of individuals inspired, above all, by compassionate and unselfish motives. However, the reputation of the Unit suffered irreparable damage as a result of a series of incidents and events that still remain not fully explained or understood. Furthermore, there were those who used controversy and rumour to deliberately undermine the fundraising efforts of the Units patron and supporters. There is much still to be learned about the creation and the functioning of the SAU an outstanding but largely overlooked humanitarian gesture on behalf of the people of Scotland to those suffering the effects of a brutal civil war in Spain.

With a foreword by Jon Snow. In July 1936 insurgent Spanish troops organized a military coup to oust the elected Republican government in Madrid. The rebel generals expected to force a quick, clean regime change but they failed. The botched uprising turned into a bloody civil war. Hundreds of thousands died in a bitter conflict which tore the country apart and rapidly turned into the prelude for an even greater conflict yet to com--the Second World War. The siege of Madrid was the key battle of the war. The world watched and waited for the city to surrender as General Franco's Nationalist army, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, closed in on the Spanish capital. But Madrid did not fall. Madrilenos fought tooth and nail to defend their city. Helped by volunteers from fifty other countries--the International Brigades--they held out against all the odds until the end of the conflict in 1939. Despite its central role in twentieth-century history, the siege of Madrid is an episode largely hidden from today's visitor. There is no guide to the war sites and few clues for the inquisitive traveller who wants to know more. Frontline Madrid fills that gap. This unique guide book explains what life was like in the city under siege and what happened in the battlefield dramas. The simple to follow maps and diagrams make it easy to visit the frontline sites. The vividly written descriptions bring events and people compellingly to life. The role of prominent individuals, British and American--Orwell, Hemingway, John Cornford - is explored. Off the beaten track, from the University district in the city centre to the mountains of Guadarrama less than an hour away, the remains of the war in Madrid can still be found--gun emplacements, bunkers, trenches and occasional debris. Frontline Madrid retraces the footsteps of those who lived through the conflict to take the reader on a tour in time. The usual tourist traps are left far behind to enter the gripping world of a war which shaped modern European history.

The memoir of Sam Russell (1915-2010), a communist journalist and a British volunteer with the anti-fascist Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. First-hand accounts of significant historical events, from the formerly occupied Channel Islands at the end of World War II to the show trials of communists in Eastern Europe in the 1950s. Fascinating insight into the Spanish Civil War, the history of communism, and British radical history.

The history of the Moroccan troops in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is the story of an encounter between two culturally and ethnically different people, and the attempts by both sides, Moroccan and Spanish, to take control of this contact. This book shows to what extent colonials could participate in negotiating limits and taboos rather than being only on the receiving end of them. The examination of this encounter, in its military, religious, as well as sexual aspects, sheds new light on colonial relations, and on how unique or typical the Spanish colonial case is in comparison to other European ones.

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.

Born to fanatical religious zealots, deeply wounded by an unloving mother and a weak father whom he hated, Norman Bethune struggled throughout his life to overcome deep emotional scars. Sexually inhibited, given to outbursts of near psychopathic rage, this wounded doctor healed himself through healing others. In the mid-1930s, Bethune emerged as a renowned surgeon fighting the twin plagues of disease and fascism. When Franco launched his offensive, Bethune travelled quickly to Madrid, organised a mobile transfusion service and, often under fire, brought blood to the wounded at the front. David Lethbridge presents the complex of Bethune's unique activities and personality as they intersected with history: His engagement with medical, political, and military civil war players, and the Communist party; his cadaver blood transfusion work with the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, Hermann Muller; the profound effect that the Malaga atrocity had on him, and the role it played in his attempt to build "children's cities" outside war zones; his meeting with Graham Spry a high-ranking functionary in the Canadian social democratic party, the CCF; the unravelling of Bethune's romantic relationship with the Swedish journalist Kasja Rothman; the implications of his friendship with Henning Sorensen, a possibly secret member of the Communist Party of Canada, and the circumstances of the conspiracy that led to Bethune's ejection from Spain. The book concludes with Bethune's political tour throughout North America raising funds and public awareness on behalf of the Spanish Republic.

"A remarkable act of personal history: brave, revelatory and unflinchingly honest" WILLIAM BOYD "There is no-one writing in English like this: engaged humanity achieving a hard-won wisdom" DAVID MILLS, The Times Lord of All the Dead is a courageous journey into Javier Cercas' family history and that of a country collapsing from a fratricidal war. The author revisits Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to research the life of Manuel Mena. This ancestor, dearly loved by Cercas' mother, died in combat at the age of nineteen during the battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest episode in Spain's history. Who was Manuel Mena? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment to the author, or a young idealist who happened to fight on the wrong side? And how should we judge him, as grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, interpreting history from our supposed omniscience and the misleading perspective of a present full of automatic answers, that fails to consider the particularities of each personal and family drama? Wartime epics, heroism and death are some of the underlying themes of this unclassifiable novel that combines road trips, personal confessions, war stories and historical scholarship, finally becoming an incomparable tribute to the author's mother and the incurable scars of an entire generation.

The history of the Moroccan troops in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) is the story of an encounter between two culturally and ethnically different people, and the attempts by both sides, Moroccan and Spanish, to take control of this contact. This book shows to what extent colonials could participate in negotiating limits and taboos rather than being only on the receiving end of them. The examination of this encounter, in its military, religious, as well as sexual aspects, sheds new light on colonial relations, and on how unique or typical the Spanish colonial case is in comparison to other European ones.

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.