Spanish Civil War and Soviet intervention: a Spaniard ML's historical research and perspective

I've spent the past days reading extensively some modern historiographical works regarding the Spanish civil war and Soviet intervention, due to previous quarrels in this topic with lemmy "anarchists" (links on the writeup). Tl;Dr: go to the conclusions of the writeup if you want an extremely brief summary of what I've found out in my research, or just browse through the sources yourself to form your own opinion. Warning: this writeup is LONG. If you wish, first go through the quoted sections (excerpts from the literature) and read my interpretations on them. Hope you enjoy!

Intro: what led me to this

For the past decades and with the opening of the Soviet archives (which proved that the previously repeated figures for the Soviet deportations and great terror were overestimated), there has been an intensified campaign by European authorities to manufacture anti-Russian and anti-Soviet propaganda. Often times, this has taken the shape of promoting the Nazi-peddled “double genocide theory”, and revisionist interpretations of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. When discussing the latter read my effortpost about it, I often like to bring up, being myself a Spaniard, that in 1936, while France and England looked the other way, the Soviets were the only European power to materially help the Republican and Anarchists in Spain in their civil war against Fascism, even if Nazis and Italian Fascists were openly carrying out military action in the region against the non-intervention agreement. When I bring this up, libs normally don’t have any response, but self-described “anarchists” will present the Soviet support in the Spanish civil war as a plot to destroy anarchism, and will bring up the “massive repressions” carried out by the NKVD after the May Days against the anarchists, as a form of the “ML stab in the back to anarchists” idea that’s so popular in western anarchist circles. Example here.

I considered that I may be wrong about this, and maybe the Soviets had carried out a massive repression against Anarchists in Spain, so I decided to ask the Anarchists themselves: I made a post explicitly asking for numerical estimates of such repressions in c/Anarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com. The only response I received (more upvoted than my request) amounts to saying I shouldn’t expect to find such accurate historical estimates. Having read plenty about the Soviet repressions, I’m aware that the Soviets kept extremely detailed accounts of such repressions because, unlike fascists, they weren’t ideologically murderous repressors, they were just paranoid of a Nazi invasion but their purpose wasn’t to control people through fear. To this day, organizations such as Memorial from Russia enable people to scour through the tons of available data on their repressions and to find their ancestors and what happened to them. This kinda triggered me because, why would the Soviets keep such extensive records even during WW2 times, but completely negate this for the Spanish civil war? So I decided to embark on my own research.

My research: repression in the Republican side, and the Soviet point of view

Listening to the ProlesPod Episode 70 in which they briefly discuss the Soviet intervention in the Spanish civil war, they mention (around 1:18:18) that the modern estimates of repressions by the NKVD in Republican Spain amount to 20 people. After hours of searching through their sources (available on their Patreon to free-tier subscribers), I stumbled upon some interesting authors, books and articles, which I will cite in the following text. Note that my focus will be on the Republican and Soviet repressions. This is far from an intent at condemnation of antifascist repression in the antifascist side, far from that. I just believe that everyone reading this shares my antifascist beliefs and doesn’t need to be told how horrifying and unjustified the Francoist repression was.

As it turns out: there ARE modern estimates of repression victims in the Spanish civil war. In the Bloomsbury Handbook of the Spanish Civil War, a very modern, well-researched and well-sourced work printed in 2023, Chapter 15 is entirely devoted to it. The chapter begins:

The repression behind the lines during the Civil War saw the rebels and Francoists consign at least 100,000 opponents to an early grave, with nearly 30,000 executed after the end of the conflict. [...] The bulk of the victims’ remains continue to rest in an estimated 115,000 anonymous mass graves. Meanwhile, nearly 50,000 people perished in government territory: the vast majority in the first few months of the Civil War.

The chapter continues with extensive description of Francoist repression in scope and methods, and follows with repression in the Government side. In contrast to the Francoist regime’s repression, mandated from above by General Mola, the book claims:

Much of the drive for the violence in the government zone that killed some 50,000 people emerged from below, as the Barcelona case helps to illustrate. Barcelona’s inner cities housed factory workers and groups living on the fringes of society such as street traders. Both workers and the urban poor shared the same experience of expensive rental properties, high food prices, and a dislike of state representatives such as the police. Together they often took part in raids on food shops and rent strikes, and banded together to prevent the police from clamping down on hawkers. Over time a firm anti-capitalist and anti-state attitude emerged within these groups which the anarchist CNT successfully mobilized. The same attitude rendered many CNT members hostile to the Republican state which continued to use the police against the urban poor and even placed those labelled as socially dangerous in concentration camps. The repression made conventional protest difficult and encouraged armed activists to take direct action which ranged from violent insurrection to ‘armed shopping trips’. When the July 1936 coup began, CNT activists forged in this environment took a prominent role in seizing tens of thousands rifles from military barracks and in suffocating the revolt. The armed activists, often joined by other political groups, began to purge their neighbourhoods of those they labelled reactionaries and fascists. […] This forms an important part of the context in which a total of 8362 people were killed behind the lines across Catalonia, a substantial number of whom were targeted as class enemies

The ground-up approach to repression of fascists in Barcelona has a very different character (and a strikingly similar scope) of the repression by Republican government forces against fascism in Madrid:

Trade unions and political parties feared the enemy in their midst and rapidly formed their own militia squads and set up security organizations. In confiscated buildings they created prisons which became known as Checas, after the Bolshevik internal police forces. By the high summer of 1936, there were 200 Checas at work in Madrid alone, although only around twenty-five took a prominent part in the violence. The most infamous operated at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. Members of the Checas often tracked down their victims through anonymous denunciations. Prisoners judged to be rightists or to have taken part in fifth-column activity were often executed. Their corpses were found in Madrid’s streets and parks shortly afterwards. The killers even left notes on some of the bodies explaining that the person had died for shooting on the people. In total, 8815 people would be killed in Madrid during the war. Unlike in rebel territory, however, the bodies were, in many cases, identified and relatives were able to claim their loved ones. The General Security Directorate kept photographs of all the bodies found. […] Before the Republican state could fully take control and put a stop to most violence behind the lines, a series of horrific killings took place in Madrid between November and December 1936. These murders of prisoners transferred from besieged Madrid to other prisons in Spain and killed on their journeys in the towns of Paracuellos and Torrejón de Ardoz claimed the lives of between 2200 and 2500 prisoners. They are notorious for both their scale and the involvement of the famous Communist Party leader Santiago Carrillo, who faced consistent accusations against him and the Republican government from the right for his role in Paracuellos

It seems that, after all, centralized communist repression (no mention of Soviet involvement in this) is well-documented, including exact numbers and pictures of the repressed except in extreme cases such as the polemic “matanza de Paracuellos” (quickly organized mass-murder of fascist prisoners upon foreseeing a fascist attack on the prison region). The chapter’s conclusions about this are very explicit:

Unlike the Francoists, rather than deny the violence, government leaders acknowledged it and campaigned against it. Moreover, bodies were recovered and documented and in some cases the authorities also oversaw the exhumation of victims and began investigations into the murders.

If the repressions are well-documented, where is the information on Soviet repressions? For this, I will move to Ángel Viña’s works. It’s useful to understand the Soviet policy with respect to the Spanish civil war.

The context is 1936. Hitler and Mussolini openly talk of extermination of “Jewish-Bolshevism” and make it clear, through policy such as the Generalplan Ost, that their intention is to eliminate communism and exterminate/deport all the non-German peoples between Berlin and the Urals. The Soviets have been pursuing the so-called “collective security policy” with France and England against the Nazis, meaning they’ve been using all their diplomatic tools to seek mutual defense agreements against the Nazis under the doctrine of People’s Comissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR Maxim Litvinov. The Spanish civil war has just started, and England and Britain hurry to sign a non-intervention pact with Hitler and Mussolini, which the western “democracies” will hold but the Fascist regimes will ignore and invade Spain together with the Francoists. The Republican government is therefore only left with one ally selling them modern weapons: the Soviets.

However, the Soviets do not desire to enter open conflict in Spain for fear of triggering a war against the fascists without the support of England and France. A Spanish republican diplomat named Pascua is sent to Moscow and received bv Stalin himself. The author Ángel Viñas, as explained in his 2007 book “El escudo de la república”, has recovered the notes of the meetings by Pascua. Stalin’s policy is clear: they do not wish to implement a Soviet-style government in republican Spain. This would directly make France and England not aid the Spaniards, and the hopes are that, when these western regimes react against fascism and see that they can collude with the Soviets against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in Spain, they can do it outside too. From Chapter 9 “Stalin da una teórica”:

Stalin demostró una notable consistencia argumental y un conocimiento exhaustivo de los problemas españoles. No es de extrañar ya que era un trabajador auténticamente estajanovista. […] Stalin insistió en las confiscaciones y la libertad de comercio. Con ello aludía simplemente a los elementos básicos que tipifican un ordenamiento económico NO socialista. […] No es nada de extrañar puesto que constituía un camino imprescindible para promover el acercamiento de la República hacia los países democráticos occidentales.

Stalin portrayed a remarkable argumentatory consistency and a thorough knowledge of the Spanish problems. This isn’t surprising, given that he was an authentically Stakhanovite worker. […] Stalin insisted on the expropriations and freedom of trade. With this, he simply alluded to the basic elements that describe an NON Socialist economic system. […] This is not surprising given that this constituted and unavoidable path to promote a reapprochement between the Republic and the western democratic countries

So, Stalins is clear: he does not want to impose Soviet rule in Spain, he wants the Republican government to prevail. In fact, he promotes popular-front tactics joining Republicans, Communists and Anarchists in the antifascist struggle, explicitly praising the Anarchists:

Aludió ampliamente a los anarquistas y señaló que en las filas confederales había buenos elementos. Preguntó si podría haber una plataforma común entre socialistas y comunistas a propósito de la CNT. La respuesta de Pascua fue afirmativa, aunque con matices.

He extensivelty referred to the Anarchists and pointed out that there were good elements among the confederates [CNT, largest Spanish anarchist organization at the time]. He asked whether there could be a common platform between socialists and communist regarding the CNT. Pascua’s answer was affirmative, though with caveats.

However, Stalin also points out that the anarchist war tactics are failing, and harshly criticises them. After all, the Bolsheviks and Stalin had experienced something very similar during their own civil war some 20 years earlier, where initially the Reds attempted to organize horizontal worker militias as a form of fight against the Tsarist forces. This failed tremendously, and they were forced to conscript a regular hierarchical army with strict and disciplined command lines. Stalin is therefore very insistent on discipline. However he also understands that the path to discipline is not through violence but through ideology and common goals, as he explicits later:

Desde el punto de vista de la contribución al esfuerzo de guerra Stalin atacó duramente la táctica anarquista, propia de charlatanes, según la calificó. Durruti había sido un fracaso, por falta de organización y de disciplina. […] Reiteró que había que encontrar formas de acceder a las masas anarquistas e influir en ellas, lo cual sólo sería posible si los socialistas y los comunistas trabajaban juntos. Era preciso concienciar a los obreros de buena fe que seguían a los líderes anarquistas

From the point of view of the contribution to the war effort, Stalin harshly attacked the anarchist tactics, characteristic of charlatans as he described it. Durruti had been a failure due to lack of organization and discipline. […] He insisted that they had to find ways to appeal to the anarchist masses and influence them, which would only be possible if the Socialists and Communists worked together. It was necessary to create a consciousness in the good-faithed workers who followed the anarchist leadership.

Stalin continues warning against anarchist political intrigues and emphasizes the role of discipline:

Era necesario que el Estado se comportase de manera disciplinada y resultaba imprescindible que se incrementase la disciplina en el ejército. Los obreros comprenderían las ventajas. Había que desenmascarar la propaganda errónea y denunciar las intrigas de los anarquistas. Pascua anotó en mayúsculas el mensaje central: SIN DISCIPLINA Y SIN FUERZA NO SE HACE LA GUERRA Y NO SE CONSEGUIRIA LA VICTORIA. El armamento y la táctica no conducían necesariamente a ella. Los anarquistas habían ocultado armas de procedencia soviética, a pesar de que otras unidades carecían de ellas.

It was necessary for the State to behave in a disciplined manner, and that discipline increased in the army. The workers would understand the advantages. There was a need to unmask erroneous propaganda and to denounce the anarchist intrigues. Pascua noted down in uppercase the core message: WITHOUT DISCIPLINE AND STRENGTH WAR CANNOT BE MADE AND VICTORY CAN’T BE ACHIEVED. Weaponry and tactics don’t necessarily drive to it. The anarchists had hidden weapons of Soviet origin despite other units lacking them.

This makes the Soviet position in the conflict clear: the anarchists are valuable and necessary for the struggle, but discipline and unity are required in order to have a functioning government and army capable of defeating fascism. This position is far from the “repression of anarchists foremost” framework that has been presented to me in the past, and more in line with my thoughts on Communist and Soviet actuation during the war.

Repression against anarchists: the May Days, Andreu Nin and the NKVD

The main claim of Anarchist repression by the NKVD and the Communists is linked to the May Days, in which after some Anarchists in Barcelona in May 1937 forcibly took over some key businesses including telephone lines and weapon factories, government forces repressed the Anarchists using the force, disbanded them and turned Barcelona into a more government-controlled city rather than anarchist-controlled. This resulted in the deaths of some 500-1000 Anarchists. One of the most well-known episodes of this event is the arrest, torture and murder of Trotskyist party leader Andreu Nin (POUM party) at the hands of the NKVD, which we will get to later.

Often cited is Jose Peirats’s “The CNT in the Spanish Revolution: Volume 3”. Jose Peirats was a young CNT member at the time who lived through the May Days in Barcelona, and describes (without sources, as he generally does throughout the whole book) the activities of the Spanish republican secret police (SIM), which started operating in August 1937, some months after the May Days:

No one dreamed that a counter-espionage agency [SIM] could so promptly removed into a mighty political tool of one party to use against the rest. Nonetheless, this was the case with the SIM which turned from a government agency into the Spanish subsidiary of the Soviet GPU. For it is beyond question that the initiative originated with “Soviet advisors” […] like the Comissariat, the SIM too was of Soviet manufacture. […] The SIM also took care to probe state secrets in the realms of diplomacy, industry and armaments. The sole beneficiary of this sort of activity was the Soviet state.

This entirely unsourced bunch of information is purely the author’s belief. The author being a CNT member himself, it’s hard to consider this an unbiased account based on evidence. The entire book is unfortunately written in this fashion. Let us see the extent of the Chekas organized by the Republican government and their results:

One of the most ominous sections was Section 13. It had charge of the arrest, interrogation and maltreatment of detainees. For accuracy’s sake, it needs to be lkaced on record that the SIM rendered some remarkable services to the anti-fascist cause, and that on occasions it dismantled Fifth Column organisations. For instance, at the start of 1938, it uncovered the lists of membres and leaders of the Falange Española [fascist organization] operating in Catalonia. The arrests numbered 3500. But it needs to be pointed out that the success of the operation was made possible with the use of torture. And the same methods were also employed on anti-fascists who incurred the wrath of the SIM’s putative fathers. In every instance, the terror and tortures inflicted upon defenceless men are a repugnant and damnable monstrosity

Leaving aside the moralism and goodism of not wanting to have a secret intelligence service harm fascist prisoners during a literal civil war, these “3500 fascists” is the only figure provided in this chapter for the number of repressed. What follows are pages upon pages of atrocity propaganda against the antifascists who lost the war. Despite this, we have seen that modern historians place the majority of Government repressions and murders in the first months of the war, and largely due to grassroots violence (especially in anarchist-controlled regions like Barcelona). The author does not once mention this in the “terror in the rearguard” chapter of the book, proving his lack of intent of measuring and condemnation of violence, and instead his political attempt at disregarding anarchist violence and condemning only centralized one, even if both were enacted overwhelmingly against fascists. Peirats now concerns himself with the murder of Andreu Nin:

With Lenin dead, and Trotsky expelled from the USSR, Nin made no secret of his sympathies with Trotsky’s teachings and he in turn was expelled from the ‘Soviet Paradise’. He came back to Spain when the Republic was proclaimed, and promptly organised an anti-Stalinist faction, before joining with Maurin, against the wishes of Trotsky, to form the POUM. […] But the suppression pure and simple of this party was not enough. It had to be demonstrated by fair means or foul that the main leaders of the POUM were enemies of the people and of the world’s proletariat: that they were fascist agents and these charges, as serious as they were unfounded, had to be proved. Orlov, the GPU’s chief in Spain, took this repugnant task upon himself. The trap, according to Jesus Hernandez, was quickly prepared.

We will see about the “unfounded” nature of such claims of fascist involvement in the Anarchist revolts. The author continues with his atrocity propaganda of Andreu Nin’s torture and murder, with only one caveat: this is all entirely made up. The vast descriptions of Nin resisting torture and not confessing to false crimes are not from any historical document or any account of the Soviet agents who did kidnap him. In fact, Nin’s whereabouts were only found out in the 90s with the opening of the Soviet archives, and the Soviet agents involved couldn’t declare about this because they were killed in the great terror. All in all: Nin was kidnapped and killed by the NKVD under fabricated charges, but the accusations of torture are a complete invention that I will not reproduce here.

Modern historical evidence, however, has shed some light into this. We will now leave behind Jose Peirats’s biased and unfounded accounts lacking any historical sourcing of figures and completely disregarding Anarchist violence, and we will move on to contemporary historiography on Orlov (the Soviet head of the NKVD in Spain), both by Ángel Viñas and by a the Russian author Boris Volodarsky, the latter having accessed new documents from the released Soviet archives on Orlov.

On Volodarsky’s account of Orlov, “Stalin’s Agent: the life & death of Alexander Orlov”, we find out that the Soviet intelligence was actually aware of Nazi activity pushing for the anarchist revolt in Barcelona. As it turns out, the Soviets had a spy in Nazi Germany by the name of Harro Schulze-Boysen, reporting on Nazi activity in the Spanish civil war from within the German army. In Chapter 17 of the book, we learn that Orlov did indeed manufacture false evidence to convict Andreu Nin and eventually murder him after the May Days took place. However, we also find out that Orlov had information about the Fascist plot to incite the revolts. On the one hand, from Grover C. Furr’s article published on Wiley Labor and Society titled “Leon Trotsky and the Barcelona “May Days” of 1937”, we find the execution documents of Harro Schulze-Boysen by the Nazis once they uncovered him as a spy:

At the beginning of 1938 [the Nazis got the year wrong], during the Spanish Civil War, the accused learned in his official capacity that a rebellion against the local red government in the territory of Barcelona was being prepared with the co-operation of the German Secret Service. This information, together with that of von Pöllnitz, was transmitted by him to the Soviet Russian embassy in Paris. (Haase, 1993, p. 105).

Ángel Viñas confirms this in “El Escudo de la República”, on the chapter about the May Days:

[…] no parece nada inverosímil que elementos profascistas y profranquistas contribuyeran a incitar la revuelta. Obviamente, no fue su acción la que la desencadenó pero, en una situación inestable, tensa, cualquier chispa podía tener consecuencias imprevisibles y no hay que olvidar que el 2 de mayo desde las filas de Estat Català se abrió fuego contra los anarquistas.

[…] it doesn’t seem unlikely that pro-fascist and pro-Franquist elements contributed to push for the revolt. Obviously, it wasn’t their actions which unleashed it but, in an unstable and tense situation, any spark could have unforeseeable consequences, and one must not forget that on May 2nd from the lines of Estat Català they opened fire against the anarchists.

Discrediting the view that the repressions on Anarchists were directed by the Soviets, he writes:

Para toda una tradición historiográfica, Rodríguez Salas fue, simplemente, el ejecutor de los designios del lejano y topoderoso Stalin. Conquest (p. 410) puso encima de ella el marchamo de su incomparable autoridad. Pero no parece que fuese cierto.

For an entire historiographic tradition, Rodríguez Salas [communist] was, simply, the executing hand of the designs of the far and all-powerful Stalin. Conquest (p.410) put on this the weight of his incomparable authority. But it doesn’t look like this was true

Well, if it isn’t Robert Conquest, the Anglo anticommunist propagandist who got awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush himself! Now we see the origin of such claims and why they’re repeated by Anarchists all over! Further discussion by Viñas describes the makeup of the Barcelona rebels, citing Orlov:

Orlov (p. 304) ofrece la composición de los levantados en armas: 1500 de la FAI, unos 3000 cenetistas amén de un millar de miembros del POUM. Obsérvese el pequeño número de estos últimos, quizá incluso abultado por conveniencias comunistas.

Orlov (p. 304) offers the makeup of the risen in arms: 1500 from FAI, about 3000 from CNT and some thousand members of POUM. Notice the small number of the latter, perhaps even inflated by communist conveniences

Viñas even directly and explicitly pushes against the pro-POUM anarchist version that has been so propagated:

Su tesis, coetánea de los sucesos y nutrida en el marco ideológico de la guerra fría, sigue coloreando la literatura. Los acontecimientos de Barcelona, afirman en síntesis, fueron provocados por Stalin en búsqueda de una confrontación que permitiera destrozar tanto a la izquierda comunista no estalinista como al anarquismo. […] Hasta el momento, sin embargo, nadie ha puesto sobre la mesa pruebas concluyentes

Their thesis [anarchists, trotskyists, POUMists], simultaneous with the events and nourished in the ideological framework of the cold war, remains colouring the literature. The events in Barcelona, they affirm synthesizing, were caused by Stalin in his search for a confrontation that allowed him to destroy both the non-Stalinist communist left and the anarchism. […] To this point, however, nobody has provided conclusive evidence.

The author explicitly rejects the anarchist and trotskyist point of view, which he claims is very represented in the topic’s literature and also sees as very influenced ideologically by the cold war. It’s a long chapter, you can read it if you want, but this section concludes:

Concluyamos esta sección afirmando que no hemos indicado nada que abone la tesis de una participación soviética en el chispazo del polvorín de Barcelona, según los documentos del NKID y del GRU

Let us conclude this section affirming that we haven’t indicated anything that supports the thesis of Soviet participation in the spark of the blowup in Barcelona, according to documents of the NKVD and the GRU

It’s worth it, in my opinion, to dedicate a little bit more of analysis to the topic of cold war propaganda influencing all of this. Where, then, have these unsupported ideas of machiavellian Soviet influence pervading everything originated, and who supported them? Back to the Bloomsbury Manual’s chapter 15 on the repressions, we see what the Francoists claim:

Franco claimed that 800,000 ‘martyrs’ had died in the government zone while denying the violence carried out by his supporters. He also maintained that his opponents’ violence was directed by the Comintern and government leaders such as Juan Negrín who became no more than the servile disciples of Soviet thugs.

From chapter 17 of the same book:

neo-Francoists have challenged this narrative, in the service of their efforts to rehabilitate the Nationalists. Thus, they have tried to minimize the Nationalist repression by challenging or parsing the numbers and to justify most of it as legitimate punishment. For the other side, they frame republican violence within a ‘revolutionary’ dynamic that could be traced back to 1931 but which culminated in a ‘totalitarian’ Soviet-style extermination carried out by ‘checas’.

[…] In terms of defining the identity of the Republican side, the neo-Francoist narrative of communist takeover revisits early Cold War arguments articulated by the dictatorship as well as in the memoirs of the disillusioned left in exile. It is hardly coincidental that a new Spanish edition of Burnett Bolloten’s classic 1961 book, The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution, appeared in 2004, to reinforce the conservative recovery of this narrative. Bolloten concluded that if the Republic had won the war, it would have been a preview of the Soviet-controlled ‘popular democracies’ installed in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. However, since the opening of Soviet archives after 1989, most academic historians who have begun to explore the vast repository of primary sources have argued for a much more limited view of Soviet intervention and control.

So: it was fascist and cold-war propaganda all along, which has been dismantled progressively after the Soviet archives opening up. As in the case of Molotov-Ribbentrop exposed originally, the origins are the same. Yet another case to the endless list of cold war propaganda molding the discourse of supposed people on the left of the political spectrum. As I often say: when you share your opinion on Soviet actions and attitudes with cold-war propaganda or Nazi/Fascist discourse, rethink your position.

[…] Likewise, those studying the behaviour and discourse of the Communist party within Spain have rejected the classic portrait of a monolithic, all-powerful and ruthless organization bent on destroying all its rivals as too one-dimensional and out of proportion to its modest resources on the ground

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum’s 2015 book “International communism and the Spanish civil war” also has sections devoted to this topic of the extent of Soviet control over the Republican government, and agrees with the extent:

Stalinism as an international culture drew communists together with shared narratives, heroes, holidays, emblems, and enemies. But for all they shared, local communist political cultures remained distinct. In Spain, officers and commissars had a penchant for labeling all sorts of behaviors as “Trotskyite” and for threatening to arrest or shoot malingerers, deserters, and malcontents.140 However, they rarely did – which is not to excuse or minimize the executions that occurred […]. The lower level of political violence in Spain underscores thefact that in the Spanish context, it was possible to think – or threaten – like a Stalinist, but it was not always necessary or possible to act like one.

Again, further support from modern historiography that the level of political violence in Spain was minor compared to the Soviet Union.

Conclusions

I believe I have provided evidence to affirm that the modern anarchist/trotskyist discourse on the Soviet repressions of anarchists are overmagnified, based primarily on unreliable sources that don’t use archival evidence but anecdotal evidence, and that the modern historiographic consensus demonstrates that the Soviet impact on Spanish politics during the civil war is very limited. The intentions of the Soviets are misconstrued and demonized through the usage of cold-war or directly Francoist propaganda, archival releases from the USSR period provide evidence of fascist influence on the May Days that justifies a certain degree of repression to maintain unity against the Fascist invasion and prove that the intent was not “the crushing of anarchists” as much as stability and discipline during wartime.

Sources

-International Communism and the Spanish Civil War, by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

-The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Spanish Civil War

-Stalin’s Agent: the life and death of Alexander Orlov, by Boris Volodarsky

-El Escudo de la República, by Ángel Viñas

-Leon Trotsky and the Barcelona “May Days” of 1937, by Grover C. Furr