Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War
By James K. Hopkins
Stanford University Press, 2000
474 pages, $44.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
It was a desperate time. It called for desperate measures. When General Franco, aided by Hitler and Mussolini, rose against the Spanish centre-left government in July 1936, the global spread of the fascist cancer stood at a turning point. With the other capitalist states alarmed by the revolutionary fervour of Barcelona and Madrid and hiding behind a policy of "non-intervention", it was left to the workers of the world to come to the defence of the Spanish Republic.
As part of this mass movement, 40,000 workers, and their middle-class allies, from over 50 countries made the desperately brave decision to join the International Brigades, a volunteer peoples' army, to fight fascism on Spanish soil. James Hopkins' compelling new book, Into the Heart of the Fire, follows the 2100 British volunteers in the English-speaking XVth Brigade.
The Spanish drama was the logical next act for Britain's working class, determined to resist the harsh fascist medicine being threatened as a cure for the Depression. Economic hardship in Britain had produced its politicised class fighters, militant workers steeled in class struggle and educated in Marxist politics through the Communist Party of Great Britain.
It also attracted those middle-class intellectuals opposed to capitalist power. The first British volunteer to be killed in Spain was Felicia Browne, artist and communist, killed in a raid to blow up a fascist munitions train.
By liberally airing the voices of the worker-soldiers, Hopkins' book counteracts the cultural weight of the middle-class artists and writers whose "recollections of the war have condemned the working class volunteers to historical silence".
The workers' voices reveal a courageous and politically committed working class of many virtues — bravery, egalitarianism, idealism. The volunteers overwhelmingly "fought bravely and well", their performance enhanced by Marxist internationalism.
In their first major engagement, the battle of the Jarama Valley, the inexperienced British battalion, outgunned by Franco's professional soldiers, retreated only to regroup and advance singing the Internationale, forcing the fascists back and keeping a vital lifeline to Madrid open. Despite horrendous casualty rates, the British volunteers never lost their nerve, nor their sense of humour — as one book-toting volunteer jokingly recalled, Marxism saved the day when a thick textbook on dialectics proved impervious to a fascist bullet.
Fascist bullets, however, weren't the only danger to the volunteers. The Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union fatally undermined the anti-fascist struggle by launching a "civil war within the Civil War". The Stalinist bureaucracy, which had stolen the fruits of the Russian Revolution, was fighting a bloody terror campaign against any political opposition which threatened their material and political power.
In Spain from May 1937, Soviet terror increased against dissident communists and non-party socialists such as those in the quasi-Trotskyist POUM (for which George Orwell fought) and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT trade union federation. Both were crushed in Barcelona by the Soviet political police and the Spanish "Popular Army" (a state-arm of the Popular Front government which included the Spanish Communist Party).
The anti-Stalinists' "treason" was to advocate winning the revolution to win the war. This was anathema to Stalin who, rather than promote socialist revolution internationally, was concerned only to protect the national interests of the Soviet Union, and thus the Soviet bureaucracy, by cosying up to the capitalist states against fascist Germany through the disastrous popular front strategy.
In Spain, the Stalinists had political control of the International Brigades. Brigade and battalion leadership was rewarded on the basis on political reliability, not necessarily military competence. The national communist parties recruited and organised the volunteers and provided the political commissars. The Soviet political police infiltrated the Spanish army and the International Brigades (which had been absorbed into the standing army) and ran its own prisons and "correction camps".
Trotskyists were routinely slandered as "fascist spies" but the only spies in the International Brigades were the Soviet political police and their agents who monitored the political attitudes of the volunteers. Those who showed political "deviation", "anti-party" attitudes, independence of thought or opposition to brigade policy or leadership were smeared as "rotten elements" or "political undesirables" and placed on file. Many were arrested. Most were sent to labour camps. A few were executed and there was speculation that dissidents were deliberately "put in harm's way" by sending them on hazardous missions behind enemy lines.
In the British battalion, Hopkins estimates that there were around 100 dissidents. When added to the 300 deserters, most of whom were voting with their feet to take the leave they had originally been promised after six months service but who were reviled by the Stalinists anyway, this made up a Stalinist blacklist of 400, one quarter of battalion strength. This "army of the forgotten" is a testimony to the malign influence of Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War.
The politically loyal volunteers were either not aware of Stalinist repression (information was controlled by the Communist Party) or chose to remain silent, accepting the situation as necessary to defeat fascism. The vigorous freedom of discussion in the brigades was "circumscribed by a political culture" which equated the interests of the Spanish struggle and world revolution with the Soviet bureaucracy.
Moralistic purists could argue that the loyal Communist Party members from the Manchester factories, the Glasgow dole queues and the Welsh mining towns were culpable for the crimes of the Soviet Stalinists in Spain. Hopkins, fortunately, does not.
He notes the distinction between the Soviet Communist Party (full of anti-revolution bureaucrats and gangsters) and the Western communist parties (full of genuine revolutionary socialists who did not have the blood of millions on their hands). The former was rotten to the core, the latter had a healthy core despite Stalinist blemishes.
The history of the British battalion in the International Brigades has long been in the hands of the International Brigade Association in Great Britain, a body under the control of Communist Party members. Theirs is a purely heroic history, untarnished by political error or Stalinist deceit, that whitewashes the role of the Soviet and Western communist parties — as Hopkins shows, using information that has recently become available from the archives of the former Soviet Union.
Hopkins' book restores the political complexities and betrayals in Spain as a matter of historical accuracy and political honesty. Hopkins concludes, nevertheless, that even when stripped of Stalinist myth, the International Brigade volunteers remain a symbol of hope in the power of international solidarity: "These men and women were the best of their time" to whom, including those silenced by Stalinism, we remain in debt.