Abstract
Gustavo Martín Asensio's The Comintern in Spain Before the Civil War: Red Tide Rising argues that communist influence in Spain before the Civil War was greater than party membership figures suggest. This clout, he claims, came from Moscow's funding and a carefully orchestrated plan of ‘subversion’. Communists, he writes, ‘punched above their weight’, infiltrating barracks, book fairs and socialist unions through front organizations. Up to this point the argument is acceptable, though hardly novel: historians have long shown that communism sought to reshape mass politics by acting across social life. Spanish historians starting with Bizcarrondo and Elorza have used the Comintern archives since the 1990s. The value of Martín Asensio's book could have lain in new sources or innovative cross-references, but instead he builds extravagant claims from a right-wing perspective.
The book's central thesis is that the main threat to the Republic came not from fascism but from communists bent on staging a Soviet-style revolution under Moscow's orders. He even insinuates that the PCE was close to seizing power in spring 1936 and exercised informal control over the Popular Front government. This mirrors Francoist propaganda. For him, Popular Front talk of democracy was a ruse to conceal ‘subversive’ aims, while fascism, he argues, was largely absent in Spain (until, one is left to assume, it fell from the skies in 1936 in reaction to communist manoeuvres). Anti-fascism, he claims, was an artificial invention of the communists. Republican authorities, even right-wing cabinets in 1933–1935, were too spineless to curb communist ‘subversion’. The implicit conclusion is that Franco's coup was justified.
I have little space to debunk these wild claims in this review. This has been done by the rich historiography on the political history of the 1930s in Spain that Martín Asensio dismisses as a product of leftist political correctness or, as Stanley Payne says in the preface, of outright ‘censorship [sic]’. Elorza and Bizcarrondo's work, based on a more honest reading of similar sources, refuted this neo-Francoist line of argument 30 years ago. In this review, I will concentrate on the flawed methodology that sustains the book's claims. Before I do this, however, I will point out that there is a detail that demolishes Martín Asensio's edifice: the entire course of events after July 1936 (which he seldom mentions). If communism, not fascism, was the main ‘subversive’ danger that beset Spanish democracy, how to explain the powerful fascist coup of July 1936 that launched civil war and produced four decades of dictatorship? If communists were intent on revolution, why did they stand on the right wing of the anti-fascist spectrum during the favourable revolutionary conditions created by the war, defending republican legality and private property, and repressing social revolution in May 1937? If they were on the verge of controlling the army by 1936, why did the Republic end in March 1939 with an anti-communist coup within its own ranks?
The author claims empirical rigour, but his use of sources shows a classic ‘tunnel vision’. He relies almost exclusively on digitalized Comintern documents, which exaggerate communist success, particularly when cadres reported to Moscow. In the chapter on the Barcelona Olympiad, for instance, he uncritically reproduces their bombast without sufficient cross-reference. Marx already cautioned that parties should be judged by what they do, not by what they say about themselves. Yet Martín Asensio takes communist self-reporting at face value. Though he says he uses press sources, references are scant and cherry-picked. For example, his sweeping claim that fascism was not a danger in 1934 rests on decontextualized remarks from Araquistain and Marcelino Domingo, ignoring the European context of spreading right-wing dictatorships (and the rich historiography on Spanish fascism).
On this shaky base he builds his fundamental claim: that the Popular Front strategy launched at the 1935 Comintern congress, which promoted broad democratic alliances, was merely camouflage for unchanged revolutionary aims. He ‘shows’ this in a short section (21–4), where he cites a September 1936 report by Victorio Codovilla about deepening the democratic revolution of April 1931, seemingly unaware of what this means. Events during the Civil War confirmed the ‘honesty’ of Popular Front moderation, as communists curbed radicalism to defend legality and attract Western allies. Stalin's policies were certainly cynical, but his overriding priority was not world revolution (turned into an abstract end goal), but Soviet security, which required alliances and combinations with capitalist neighbours. This transformed communist parties into levers of Soviet foreign policy, pushing them to the right.
The PCE continued to use radical rhetoric in 1935–36, as it was locked in competition with revolutionary socialists, dissident communists and anarchists in a turbulent social context (something Bizcarrondo and Elorza explained). But Martín Asensio ignores this turbulent social context. He describes instead an almost idyllic democratic Spain, supposedly wrecked by Muscovite agents. In reality, Spain was immersed in crisis and polarization, like much of Europe. By discarding this context, Martín Asensio adopts a conspiratorial view of communists as demiurges of rebellion, echoing ancien régime visions of revolution as the brainchild of foreign agents. The effect is to excuse, or justify, Franco's counterrevolution.