COMINTERN ARMY The International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War R. Dan Richardson THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright© 1982 by The University Press of Kentucky Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0024 Li'brary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Richardson, R. Dan, 1931- Comintem Army. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Spain-History-Civil War, 1936-1939-Foreign participation. 2. Spain-History-Civil War, 1936-1939-Foreign participation-Russian. 3. Communist International. I. Title. DP269.45.R53 946.081 80-5182 ISBN: 978-0-8131-5446-6 AACR2 For Mary Alyce This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 1 Spanish Politics and Comintem Strategy 3 2 Popular Front Militias 16 3 The Comintem Raises an Army 31 4 The Defense of Madrid 47 5 The XIII, XIV, and XV Brigades 68 6 A Military Overview 81 7 Comintem Politics 90 8 The Political Commissar 119 9 Comintem Propaganda Instrument 136 10 Dissidence, Desertion, and the Terror 159 Conclusion 177 Notes 181 Bibliographical Essay 217 Index 224 This page intentionally left blank Introduction When the first units of the International Brigades marched through the wind-swept and sparsely peopled streets of besieged Ma drid in the early morning hours of November 8, 1936, a myth was born. This myth focused on the appealing idea that the men of those first International contingents, and the thousands who were to follow them into the whirlwind of civil war in Spain, represented the re sponse of world democracy to the threat of fascism. These Interna tional volunteers were, so the theme ran, a band of modem Lafayettes and Garibaldis, the "cream of the progressive youth of the age" and "premature antifascists" who embarked on a "great crusade" to make the world safe for democracy. The facts fail to support the myth. But since this myth meshed so neatly into the larger one that cast the Spanish Civil War as a clear-cut struggle between "democracy" and "fascism," so widely held at the time, it has exhibited remarkable staying power. Actually the Spanish conflict was, as many have shown, anything but a simple and straight forward contest between democracy and fascism. Both sides in the civil war represented a varied amalgam of mutually incompatible ideologies. To say that all who fought for the Loyalists were demo crats is to stretch that term beyond meaningful definition. To say that all who fought for the Nationalists were fascists is to do the same. Once this is understood it becomes unnecessary to hold-as the myth within a myth would have it-that the foreigners who fought for the Loyalists were, by definition, fighting for democracy. In fact, when civil war and revolution exploded simultaneously in Spain in July 1936, the explosion was the result of long-brewing and uniquely Spanish developments and had its roots deep in that dis tracted country's past. But because of the ideological power struggles then smoldering in Europe the Spanish conflict quickly assumed an international significance out of all proportion to its intrinsic impor tance outside of Spain itself. Spain had the misfortune to suffer a civil war at a time when it suited powerful states and fanatical ideological forces to use that war for their own purposes. Thus Spain, a land usually self-contained and remote from the dynamic forces of history north of the Pyrenees, became the arena in which the violent political passions of the time came to grips. Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union intervened actively in the war, using Spain not only as a pawn in their game of power politics 2 INTRODUCTION but as a proving ground for their respective military and political techniques. The Soviet Union and its international apparatus, the Comintern, pursued a policy in Spain of organizing, unifying, and directing the Loyalist forces, both militarily and politically, while at the same time seeking to enlist the sympathy and support of a broad spectrum of world opinion for what they called the "defense of democracy" and "antifascism." That the Soviet-Comintern leader ship saw fit to involve itself in the Spanish affair as it did resulted from a unique confluence of the stream of Spanish history with the larger currents swirling about Europe and the world in the tumultuous decade of the 1930s. It was that confluence also which spawned the International Brigades and accounted for a Comintern army fighting in a Spanish civil war. The fame of the Brigades stems primarily from their military ex ploits, exploits certainly of significance and deserving of the recogni tion they have received. The Brigades were among the most effective military units on their side of the barricades and quite possibly made the difference between survival and defeat for Loyalist Spain during the critical winter of 1936-1937. But the Brigades were much more than simply a military force. They were a significant political, ideolog ical, and propaganda instrument which could be-and was-used by the Comintern for its own purposes, not only inside Spain but on the larger world stage. No realistic understanding of the significance of the Brigades is possible without an appreciation of their intrinsically political nature and role, nor of the fact that they were, from begin ning to end, an integral part of that interlocking directorate which was the Soviet-Comintern apparatus in Spain. 1 Spanish Politics and Comintern Strategy On July 17, 1936, elements of the Spanish army raised the banner of revolt against the government of the Republic. The pronun ciamiento, however, was not a complete success. Had it been so, the ministry would have resigned and a military junta would have as sumed governmental powers. 1 What happened instead was the deto nation of dual revolutions and a full-scale civil war in which each side sought not only the destruction of the other but the destruction of the Spanish Republic and the abortive experiment in "bourgeois democ racy" which it represented. The government against which the Spanish army rebelled was de pendent upon the Frente Popular, an electoral coalition of leftist parties which had narrowly won the elections of February 1936. The cabinets that had held the executive power of the state since the Popular Front's victory in February had been composed entirely of left republicans because both the Socialist and the Communist parties refused to participate in a "bourgeois government." This reflected the fact that the "bourgeois republican" regime was supported only grudgingly, if at all, by those very proletarian political forces that accounted for the bulk of the Popular Front's electoral strength. Thus the left republican governments had been forced to walk a tightrope while performing a political juggling act in a frantic effort to keep their erstwhile political allies from pursuing a too blatantly revolutionary program while at the same time attempting to keep these same forces in harness behind the regime. Success in the former would jeopardize the latter. But failure in the latter would mean the political bank ruptcy of a bourgeois republic dependent on the support of Marxist Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists. 2 Perhaps the most immediate and obvious manifestation of the es sential frailty of the Popular Front coalition as a base upon which to govern the Republic was the precipitous and vociferous radicalization of the Socialist party of Spain, the party that was the essential key stone of the coalition. The left wing of the party, led by the then-styled "Spanish Lenin," Francisco Largo Caballero, was demanding the Bolshevization of the party and the revolutionary road to the "dicta torship of the proletariat." Largo Caballero and his supporters had