Пол Престон – The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge (страница 3)
To dwell on the impact of the horrors of the Spanish war and on the importance of the defence against fascism is to miss one of the most positive factors of the Republican experience – the attempt to drag Spain into the twentieth century. In the drab Europe of the Depression years, what was happening in Republican Spain seemed to be an exciting experiment. Orwell’s celebrated comment acknowledged this: ‘I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’ The cultural and educational achievements of the Spanish Republic were only the best-known aspects of a social revolution that had an impact on the contemporary world which Cuba in the 1960s and Chile in the 1970s never quite attained. Spain was not only nearby, but its social experiments were taking place in a context of widespread disillusion with the failures of capitalism. By 1945, the fight against the Axis had become linked with the preservation of the old world. During the Spanish Civil War, however, the struggle against fascism was still seen as merely the first step to building a new egalitarian world out of the Depression. In the event, the exigencies of the war effort and internecine conflict stood in the way of the full flowering of the industrial and agrarian collectives of the Republican zone. Nevertheless, there was, and is, something inspiring about the way in which the Spanish working class faced the dual tasks of war against the old order and of construction of the new. The anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti best expressed this spirit when he told the Canadian reporter Pierre Van Paassen, ‘We are not afraid of ruins, we are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.’
All of this is perhaps to suggest that interest in the Spanish Civil War is made up of nostalgia on the part of contemporaries of right and left and political romanticism on the part of the young. After all, there is a strong case to be made for presenting the Spanish Civil War as ‘the last great cause’. It was not for nothing that the Civil War inspired the greatest writers of its day in a manner not repeated in any subsequent war. However, nostalgia and romanticism aside, it is impossible to exaggerate the sheer historical importance of the Spanish war. Beyond its climactic impact on Spain itself, the war was very much the nodal point of the 1930s. Baldwin and Blum, Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and Trotsky all had substantial parts in the Spanish drama. The Rome–Berlin Axis was clinched in Spain at the same time as the inadequacies of appeasement were ruthlessly exposed. It was above all a Spanish war – or rather a series of Spanish wars – yet it was also the great international battleground of fascism and communism. And while Colonel von Richthofen practised in the Basque Country the
Nor is the Spanish conflict without its contemporary relevance. The war arose in part out of the violent opposition of the privileged and their foreign allies to the reformist attempts of liberal Republican–Socialist governments to ameliorate the daily living conditions of the most wretched members of society. The parallels with Chile in the 1970s or Nicaragua in the 1980s hardly need emphasizing. Equally, the ease with which the Spanish Republic was destabilized by skilfully provoked disorder had sombre echoes in Italy, and even Spain, in the 1980s. Fortunately, Spanish democracy survived in 1981 the attempts to overthrow it by military men nostalgic for a Francoist Spain of victors and vanquished. The Spanish Civil War was also fought because of the determination of the extreme right in general and the army in particular to crush Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalisms. Spain did not witness ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the kind seen in the civil war in the former Yugoslovia. Nevertheless, Franco made a systematic attempt during and after the war to eradicate all vestiges of local nationalisms, political and linguistic. Although ultimately in vain, the cultural genocide thus pursued by Castilian centralist nationalism has provoked comparisons between the Spanish and Bosnian crises.
In Spain itself, the fiftieth anniversary of the war in 1986 was marked by a silence that was almost deafening. There was a television series and some discreet academic conferences, one of which, held under the title ‘Valencia: Capital of the Republic’, had its publicity poster, designed by the poet and artist Rafael Alberti on the basis of the Republican flag, unofficially, but effectively, banned. There was no official commemoration of the war. That was an act of political prudence on the part of a Socialist government fully aware of the sensibilities of a military caste brought up in the anti-democratic hatreds of Francoism. More positively it was a contribution to what has been called the ‘pact of oblivion’ (
In fact, in 1986, the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of a war which would see Spain suffer nearly forty years of international ostracism, the country was formally admitted into the European Community. Ten years later, the withering away of Francoism and continued consolidation of democracy were demonstrated when the Spanish government, with all-party support, granted citizenship to the surviving members of the International Brigades who fought against fascism during the Civil War. It was a welcome but belated gesture of gratitude and reconciliation which serves as a reminder of a violent and bloody Spain which has perhaps gone for ever.
It might therefore be expected that, by 2006, passionate interest in the Spanish Civil War would at last be fading. Indeed, the very opposite was the case. It was only in the early years of the twenty-first century that for many families a major area of unfinished business, the location, proper burial and mourning of their dead, has begun in earnest. It is a process that, for half of Spain, was completed more than sixty years ago. That it has been denied the other half of the country until so recently is one of the main reasons for the continuing ability of the Spanish Civil War to provoke passion.
On 26 April 1942 Franco’s government set in train a massive investigation called the ‘Causa General’. Its immediate objective was to gather evidence of Republican wrongdoing. The ‘material’ gathered ranged from documents to unsubstantiated hearsay. It was an invitation to all those with genuine grievances – the relatives of those murdered or those who had been imprisoned or had had property confiscated or stolen in the Republican zone – to vent their desire for revenge. It also permitted anyone with a personal score to settle or who coveted someone’s property or wife to smear their enemies. Although the procedures were lax in the extreme, the declarations made, substantiated or otherwise, were used to intensify the generalized image of Republican depravity. It was a part of a general pattern that had been seen since July 1936 in every part of the Nationalist zone as it fell to rebel forces. Once the Nationalists were in control, those rightists killed by the left were identified and buried with honour and dignity in ceremonies that were often followed by acts of extreme violence against the local left. In the case of extremely famous victims of the war, such as the Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera or the original leader of the military coup, General José Sanjurjo, their bodies were exhumed and then reinterred in elaborate ceremonies.
The consequence of these various procedures was that the large majority of the victims of crimes in the Republican zone were identified and counted. Their families could mourn them and very often their names were engraved in places of posthumous honour, inscribed in the crypts of cathedrals or on the external walls of churches, with crosses or plaques placed where they died or even, in some cases, with streets named after them. The structures of law and order disappeared in Republican Spain as a result of the military coup and it took several months for them to be re-established. Accordingly, the atrocities in the Republican zone were often the work of criminal elements or out-of-control extremists, although also, less frequently, of deliberate policy by leftist groups determined to eliminate their political enemies. This great variety of crimes was portrayed for nearly forty years by the propaganda machine of the victorious regime, written largely by policemen, priests and soldiers, as if it were the official policy of the Republic. The purpose of such writing was to justify the military coup of 1936, the slaughter it provoked and the subsequent dictatorship. Through the press and radio of the