Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline
Dunlap, John R
THE SPANISH REVOLUTION: THE LEFT AND THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER DURING THE CIVIL WAR Burnett Bolloten / The University of North Carolina Press $29.00, $14.00 (paper) Stanley G. Payne The Spanish...
...His new book is a massive expansion and reworking of the original volume that now stands as the definitive account of the politics of the revolutionary Left in Spain during the first crucial year of the Civil War...
...They often saw the dangers of Popular Front alliance more clearly than many middle-class liberals...
...The fact that it was proportionately the most thoroughly documented of the three studies meant little to Bolloten's critics, who damned him on both personal and political grounds, even though they were very hard put to argue with his direct evidence...
...The Spanish Revolution is unique in this century both because it is the only one to have taken place in a West European country, and because it was a pluralistic collectivist revolution not originally dominated by a one-party Communist regime...
...The dominant image of the Spanish Civil War as a struggle between "fascism and democracy" for long precluded a clear understanding of the real nature of the Spanish contest itself...
...Although Thomas and I were generally praised for our efforts, Bolloten encountered a great deal of abuse...
...While Republican constitutionalism was championed abroad, the Popular Front government of the Republican zone was defined by March 1937 as a "People's Republic of a new type," from which all rightist influences had been eliminated...
...THE SPANISH REVOLUTION: THE LEFT AND THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER DURING THE CIVIL WAR Burnett Bolloten / The University of North Carolina Press $29.00, $14.00 (paper) Stanley G. Payne The Spanish Revolution is still the forgotten revolution of the twentieth century...
...It was overshadowed by the Civil War that accompanied it and above all by the mythology generated by the war, a mythology that has gripped the Western intelligentsia, though with waning intensity, ever since...
...This specific target was not achieved, but during the last two years of the struggle Communist influence at most levels of Republican operations was preeminent...
...All this is narrated and analyzed by Bolloten in full detail and on the basis of a thorough and meticulous use of primary sources absolutely unequaled in any other account...
...Later organized as the Bolloten Collection of the Hoover Institution in California, these materials have earned the gratitude of an entire generation of scholars...
...How the Communists managed to bend the Spanish Revolution to this end has been recounted by Bolloten in masterful and telling detail...
...Internationally, the Popular Front regime was represented as a middle-class parliamentary democracy...
...There was no democracy and only a certain amount of fascism in what was in fact a revolutionary/counterrevolutionary war, the only clear-cut conflict of this kind during the twentieth-century west of Hungary or Greece...
...More than other leftist revolutionaries they behaved like free men...
...As Horacio Prieto, one of their national leaders, wrote afterward, "We went straight to a dictatorship...
...In fact, then as in other periods and countries, it was politically heterogeneous...
...The title of his first book 'referred to the effort by the Spanish Communist party (and by implication, leftist publicists), whose aim was nothing less than an extremely violent collectivist revolution, and the establishment of a Communist-dominated "People's Republic," to hide its true purposes under the facade of Republican democracy...
...Bolloten explains in detail Soviet-inspired efforts to fuse the Spanish Socialist and Communist parties into a main instrument of Communist hegemony...
...Communist policy and power in Spain have often been misinterpreted, in part because it was assumed that Communist policy must have been uniform and unidimen-sional, the same inside and outside Spain...
...lie originally worked as a United Press correspondent in Spain during the war, and subsequently invested years forming a massive documentary collection of materials from Republican refugees in France and in Mexico (where he lived for more than a decade), as well as from Spain itself...
...Just as Communist policy within Spain was adjusted according to regional, national, or international levels of propaganda, so the political goals of the Civil War were at least twofold for Soviet strategy...
...It was denounced by old and new Left alike as a crypto-fascist or pro-Franquist attempt to besmirch the glories of the Popular Front, a sort of historiographic McCarthyism...
...Although Communist military activities were often much less efficient than sometimes painted, this judgment is probably correct in that the Communists were the only leftist party willing to subordinate the revolution almost completely to the requirements of military power, a standard Communist policy throughout the world...
...Although the new study has encountered some of the same politicized and ad hominem abuse met by its predecessor, Bolloten is not at all a political writer but a scholar and historian who offers a more objective and dispassionate account of this dramatic contest than most university professors would be capable of...
...Spontaneous collectivism was not necessarily spontaneous at all, but involved the imposition of local dictatorship in every plant and district where a majority did not happen to favor Anarchism...
...During the first ten months (July 1936 to May 1937) most of the main political events of the Republican zone took place: the outburst of the Anarchist/Socialist revolution, the formation of a Popular Front revolutionary government, the dramatic growth of Spanish Communism, the political defeat of the Anarchists and their allies, and the organization of the first new-style "People's Republic" government under Communist hegemony...
...The smallest minority joined forces with the Communists...
...Students of contemporary history and of the revolutions of the twentieth century will long be in his debt.ll long be in his debt...
...In the late 1940s while the People's Democracies were being established in Eastern Europe, wartime Republican Spain was sometimes hailed as the first example of such a wartime revolutionary transition regime...
...The other side of Spanish Anarchist behavior, frequently overlooked by admirers, was a penchant for large-scale political violence and direct action of the most arbitrary sort...
...Before and during the Spanish Revolution, Spanish Socialists tended to divide in three...
...in Catalonia, the most revolutionary region of all, Catalan Communists had sometimes to compete with Anarchists in revolutionary appeals and fervor...
...The revolution itself was carried by three forces: the anarchosyndicalist CNT above all, the Spanish Socialists, and to a lesser degree the small semi-Trotskyist POUM in Catalonia...
...Since 1945 Soviet historiography has dubbed the Spanish Civil War the "Spanish national revolutionary war," thus assimilating it to postWorld War II "wars of national liberation...
...There is little doubt that Soviet strategic concerns overrode all other interests, yet it also seems clear that leadership and domination of the Spanish Revolution was a major Soviet goal within Spain itself...
...Thus a large section of Bolloten's book-nearly 120 pages- is devoted to the struggle between the revolutionary militia program and centralized Communist policy, a struggle that the Communists won almost completely...
...Anarchists were free of Marxist dogma, repudiated centralization, and appeared spontaneous and individualistic in behavior...
...The largest group supported immediate revolution, but a social democratic minority strove to moderate the revolution and return to Republican legality...
...The scholarly demythologization of the Spanish war probably began in 1961, when Hugh Thomas published the first edition of his general history, I brought out a history of Spanish fascism, and Burnett Bolloten produced his earlier study, The Grand Camouflage...
...The commonly accepted view is that the main Soviet concern in the Spanish war was strategic, and that Soviet intervention was designed to counter German and Italian influence as well as to rally the Western powers to join with the Soviet Union in an agreement for collective security...
...Spanish Anarchism has frequently seemed a romantic cause to Western liberals...
...within the leftist zone in Spain itself its declared goal was to make collectivist revolution more disciplined and responsible...
...Apologists have often claimed that whatever the Communists' shortcomings or ultimate designs, theirs was the only program of discipline, centralization, and organization (backed up by massive Russian arms shipments and technical advisers) that could have won the Civil War...
...Yet Anarchism was a Jekyll-and-Hyde phenomenon...
...The middle-class radicals of left Republicanism played a largely Kerenskyist role except in the Basque country, where Basque nationalists proved more independent and (in those days) more fastidious...
...Burnett Bolloten has probably devoted more of his life to the study of the Spanish war than any other living scholar outside Spain...
...even the Bolsheviks themselves, in their first historical opportunity, were not so quick to establish absolute power in Russia," a conclusion that was, sensu strictu, correct...
Vol. 14 • April 1981 • No. 4
