Пол Престон – The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge (страница 4)

For those on the left there had been no equivalent process of closure. There were thousands of the ‘disappeared’ (desaparecidos), their bodies not located, their manner of death not confirmed. Unlike the families of the Nationalist victims of Republican violence, the relatives of the Republican victims of the Nationalist repression could not mourn openly, let alone bury their dead. Even after the death of Franco, the problem of confronting the memory of the Civil War remained immensely difficult because the hatreds of the war had continued to fester for thirty-seven years after its formal conclusion. The dictatorship had imposed a single vision of the past but there were many other memories, hidden and repressed. Many thousands of families wanted to know what had happened to their loved ones and if, as they feared, they had been murdered, where their bodies lay. In the first months of the transition to democracy, fear of a new civil war wrestled with the desire to know about the Republican past. In the event, the drive to guarantee the re-establishment and, later, the consolidation of democracy weighed more both with politicians and with the bulk of ordinary people. The formal renunciation of revenge which was an essential precondition for change was enshrined in a political amnesty not just for those who had opposed the dictatorship but also for those guilty of crimes against humanity committed in the service of the dictatorship. The amnesty text of 14 October 1977 was supported by the majority within the political spectrum. The ghosts of the Civil War and of Francoist repression weighed on Spain, but to prevent the reopening of old wounds successive governments, both conservative and Socialist, were extremely cautious when it came to funding commemorations, excavations and research connected to the war.

The determination of the great majority of the Spanish people to secure a bloodless transition to democracy and to avoid a repetition of the violence of another civil war not only overcame any desire for revenge but also saw the sacrifice of the desire for knowledge. Thus, the ‘pact of oblivion’ saw a curtain of silence drawn over the past in the interests of a still-fragile democracy. Accordingly, there were not only very few official initiatives aimed at commemorating the past but also a certain reticence within the education system about teaching the history of the Civil War and its aftermath. Nevertheless, at a local level many historians continued to pursue research into the Francoist repression, and, for many victims, appearance in the lists compiled in their books was their only gravestone or memorial. Despite its crucial value in political terms and its importance as a measure of the great political maturity of the Spanish people, the pacto del olvido did not apply to historians. In fact, from the first, in La Rioja, in Catalonia and in Aragón, there had been considerable research into the most disagreeable aspects of the Civil War, despite the pacto. Elsewhere, the uneasy truce with the past was soon broken, with the appearance of several important works on the repression in Andalusia, Extremadura, Galicia and other regions that had found themselves within the Nationalist zone during all or part of the war. Over the last twenty years, what began as a trickle has become a torrent of books which, although written from many widely differing perspectives, has produced a generally critical vision of the insurrectionary officers of 1936.

In addition to the flood of historical works, in the same period, there has emerged a popular movement in favour of the detailed reconstruction of the war and Franco’s dictatorship at a local level. The creation of a series of organizations and associations dedicated to what has come to be called ‘the recovery of historical memory’. Several factors lay behind this development. On the one hand, there was a sense that democracy was now sufficiently consolidated to be able to withstand a serious debate about the Civil War and its consequences. Underlying this was also a terrible urgency driven by an awareness of the dwindling numbers of surviving witnesses. Without engaging in the thorny issue surrounding the fact that there are many different historical memories of the same events, it remains true that the concept of recovering memory has had a profound impact on a people whose collective memory was kept behind bars for so many decades. A process began involving the excavation of common graves (fosas), the recording of the testimonies of survivors and the proliferation of innumerable television documentaries about what happened. In consequence, today, eighty years after its outbreak, the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath are again generating passionate and, at times, bitter argument.

The breaking of the taboo associated with the pacto del olvido has had a dramatic and unexpected impact. The creation of associations dedicated to the recovery of historical memory and the efforts to locate the mortal remains of the disappeared have helped close the emotional wounds of many families. Newspapers regularly print accounts of exhumations. Barely a week passes without the publication of a detailed account of the repression in some town or province and the number of known victims is rising. Indeed, after years of such figures being reduced, they are now rising towards the levels once suggested by horrified eyewitnesses during and immediately after the war itself. In some places, ‘memory routes’ have been created along which it is possible to see places where atrocities or acts of resistance took place, all of which has created enormous discomfort, not just among the perpetrators or their relatives. The outrage provoked has extended even beyond those nostalgic for the dictatorship. It has also caused distress to extended sections of society which, over time, derived benefit from the regime. It is to this audience that a series of immensely successful historical polemics have been directed.

While there is at work a veritable army of serious researchers, there has emerged a small group of authors and broadcasters who barrack from the sidelines. Their cry is that the sufferings of Republican victims were notably less than has been claimed and that any such sufferings were, in any case, their own fault. Accordingly, the Spanish Civil War is being fought all over again on paper. These self-styled ‘revisionists’ allege that the historiographical advances of the last forty years, in all their infinite variety, are the result of a sinister conspiracy in which almost the entire historical profession and many amateur historians are involved. A wide range of historians from conservatives and clerics to liberals and leftists, as well as regional nationalists, are accused of linking arms to impose a monolithic and politically motivated interpretation of the history of the Spanish Civil War and the regime that followed it. There is little in terms of research that is new about the revisionist works. They resuscitate the basic theses of Francoist propaganda, of writers like Tomás Borrás, or the secret policemen Eduardo Comín Colomer and Mauricio Karl. In some cases, they have even recycled the titles of famous Francoist texts. The only thing that is new is the addition, in both books and inflammatory tertulias, or radio debates, of the techniques of reality television in insulting the authors of the new historiography rather than debating with them.

The consequence has been to introduce a level of abrasive tension to daily political discourse in Spain. The bulk of the historiography of the Civil War is comprised of more or less seriously researched history, which, unusually for such research, is feeding a popular demand. In contrast, the works of the revisionists have exactly the contemporary political purpose which they denounce in others. Their criticism of the Republic is implicitly a criticism of those of its values which have survived the dictatorship or been reborn in contemporary Spanish democracy. This is particularly the case with regard to the federal elements of Spain’s current structure, revisionist ire having been provoked by the fact that the present left-wing coalition government in Catalonia is actively sponsoring research into the repression. Even before this, the right had been outraged by the successful Catalan campaign for the return of tonnes of documents plundered by the Francoists in 1939. This documentation, housed in Salamanca, was originally seized to be scoured for names of leftists and liberals. Organized by archivists provided by the Gestapo, it was used, with similarly sequestered documentation from other conquered areas, to build up a file card index which became the infrastructural tool of the repression. In the view of the fiercely anti-Catalanist revisionists both the Republic and by extension the Socialist government of 2004–11 were ‘Balkanizing’ Spain. The revisionists have also derived some succour from the re-emergence in the United States of a fiercely Cold War vision of the Spanish Civil War which portrays the vanquished as the puppets of Moscow. This view, and the response it has provoked from historians within Spain and Great Britain, has also contributed to the ongoing renovation of the historiography of the Civil War.