Chapter CXXVII: Heroes of the Dialectic.
Chapter CXXVII: Heroes of the Dialectic.
The Spanish Civil War had never been an entirely Spanish affair, the country had been a hotbed for foreign intelligence operatives since long before the war had started, however it's internationalisation was still something of a drawn out affair. The summer of 1937 marked the next step in that process, the first official clash between explicitly foreign volunteers. Of course such clashes had already unofficially occurred, for instance in the battles around Almazan in the Spring many of the Republican T-26s had Soviet 'advisers' as crews, while the Boys rifles that kept them out of the town were fired by British 'trainers'. However, by unspoken agreement such clashes had been kept quiet - it served both sides to keep their foreign backers in the shadows. The Valencia Campaign would see that change, when the two sides 'official' foreign volunteer units finally clashed, it would be in a blaze of publicity.
First it is necessary to clear up a bit of terminology, like so many things in the war 'foreign volunteer' was an irregular phrase; I have brave international volunteers come to aid the cause, my allies have imported overseas mercenaries fighting for gold and the thrill of combat, the enemy have sold their soul to foreign invaders come to impose alien ways of life on the country. In truth the overseas troops had more in common than propagandists on either side wanted to admit, starting with the fact that neither set was particularly concerned by Spain in and of itself. The average 'politically' motivated volunteer (as opposed to the adventurers and the desperate) saw Spain as just one battle front in a wider ideological conflict, the actual reality of the conflict in Iberia being less important than the national politics of the volunteer's own country. The volunteers were also (mostly) united in their greenness, while there was a scattering of veterans who had fought in the Great War, or other conflicts, the majority had not and so had to substitute enthusiasm and ideological conviction for training and experience.
André Marty, pictured in his trademark ill-fitting beret, giving a speech to enthralled International Brigade volunteers in the Summer of 1937. A leading light of the French Communist Party (the PCF, Parti Communiste Français), member of the Secretariat and Praesidium of the Comintern and possessor of a suitably legendary commitment to Communism, he was Stalinist Communist aristocracy and as such had been picked by Moscow as controller of the International Brigades. Unfortunately for the volunteers of the Brigade, Marty was such a loyal Stalinist that he had adopted the paranoia and purging habits of Stalin and brought them with him to Spain. Before the end of the war he would order the execution of at least 500 Brigadiers for treason, cowardice or just a 'lack of doctrinal soundness', countless others being merely imprisoned. He was also responsible for the decision that the volunteer Brigadiers had 'volunteered' for the duration of the war, and so would not be getting their passport or identification documents back until the war was won. This decision was made very shortly after he had overseen many of those documents being packaged up and shipped to Moscow for use by the NKVD.
We begin with the Republicans and the celebrated International Brigades. While never quite as poet heavy as some would claim, at least 80% of the 'Brigadiers' were working class manual labourers, the Brigades did attract the bulk of the literary types who volunteered to fight on the Republican side and so have had more written about them than any other unit in the war. The idea of a Comintern volunteer force had been first suggested by the British and French Communist Parties in the immediate aftermath of the coup, once it became clear a civil war was inevitable. This had not fitted in with the Soviet's diplomatic plans, at that time Stalin still hoped for an alliance with France and Britain to contain Germany, so Soviet aid was kept low profile and government to government, this was felt to be less inflammatory to western political opinion. It was only after the Amsterdam Conference that Stalin abandoned any hope of getting Britain into an alliance and concentrated on France, at which point Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF, finally managed to push through the plans for the International Brigades. Somewhat ironically the Comintern rubber stamped the order on their creation on the same day that the Soviet Foreign Minister, Maxim Litvinov, was signing up to the League of Nations initiative on non-intervention in Spain. In fairness the initiative just committed the signatories to think about looking at ways to do something about the problem at some point in the future, so this was not quite as hypocritical as it may first seem. Given this background it is unsurprising the Brigades were almost the archetypal Stalinist project; there were quotas and targets for recruits, the subversion of expertise and experience to political diktat and the channelling of youthful energy and enthusiasm towards cynical ends.
Maxim Litvinov, People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, effectively the Soviet Foreign Secretary. Since Hitler's rise to power in Germany the Soviet's main foreign policy objective had been collective security in Europe, which in practice meant securing defensive agreements with the Western Powers. With Stalin distracted by internal matters Litvinov had been given a free hand to pursue this without the usual Politburo oversight, perhaps as a result of this he able to negotiate the 1935 Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the related Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Alliance. Initially these treaties had been hamstrung by France's insistence that the Locarno Pact Powers (essentially Italy and Britain) had veto over the mutual defence and military aid clauses being triggered. However after the Abyssinian War Paris had cooled on the idea of tying her foreign policy to either of those nations and was looking at her diplomatic options. The Spanish Civil War offered Moscow a chance to turn Franco-Soviet co-operation on the ground into a more traditional and solid defensive treaty.
Once the creation of the Brigades was agreed by the Comintern the Communist parties of Europe were given their quotas of required manpower and sent to work recruiting, the French PCF taking the lead both in numbers and organisation. The Comintern did not want the best and brightest, high profile leaders and those who had a possible future in Popular Front electoral efforts were to be kept out of the fighting, but equally it was not a complete barrel scrapping exercise. All recruits were interviewed by the local party hierarchy and non-party members were carefully vetted before being sent to Paris, despite these restrictions the Brigades would eventually field the equivalent of two light infantry divisions. The first men arrived at the tail end of 1936 and spent the winter training and equipping, as one of the key instruments of Soviet policy they had first call on the Soviet supply shipments and this, along with their sky high morale, was soon to mark them among the elite units on the Republican side. In the spring campaign they accompanied the PSOE/PCE (PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Spanish Socialist Workers' Party / PCE, Partido Comunista de España, Communist Party of Spain) and their T-26s on the drive for Burgos in the spring. After the bloody clash at Almazan the T-26s withdrew to lick their wounds and re-equip, prompting the PSOE/PCE to call the Brigades forward to support their efforts to restart the stalled offensive and regain the initiative.
The formation of the Brigades had been delayed by high politics, or perhaps realpolitk, as Moscow calibrated it's involvement in Spain to match it's wider objectives. The other factions in Spain had not been so limited, the Trotskyist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista , Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) had issued a call for volunteers shortly after the war broke out, despite their limited numbers compared to the Stalinists they still rallied over a thousand volunteers, including a much higher proportion of Great War veterans, these experienced men ended up as the backbone of the elite Lenin Division. The POUM, shunned by the main Republican government and hated by the Soviet backed PSOE/PCE forces, had aligned themselves with the anarchists due to a lack of options, thus the Lenin Division would find itself tasked with clearing out Catalonia alongside the remaining Catalan militias and the anarchist forces. The anarchists themselves were, typically, more divided on the issue of foreign volunteers. The CNT-FAI (CNT, Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, National Confederation of Labour - FAI, Federación Anarquista Ibérica, Iberian Anarchist Federation) leadership generally felt they had enough manpower and really wanted more weapons and supplies. However there was a strong theoretical argument that if someone wanted to fight in Spain, then as anarchists they shouldn't be stopping people from doing so. The issue was resolved on a column by column basis, some accepting foreign volunteers with open arms and others trying to send them back to rally support in their home countries. The shock of the casualties taken during the Catalonia campaign would prompt most columns to accept any half fit volunteer who turned up, if only to help replenish the ranks.
In the next chapter we will turn out attention to those who travelled to Spain to fight for the Monarchist cause, in the main these were not men motivated by a dream of Carlist restoration but by the chance to fight against the Republicans and their backers.
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Notes:
This started as a quick check of how the international situation would change the International Brigades and then spiralled into this. From the top;
André Marty was that unpleasant, did order at least that many volunteers shot, did ship everyone's passports to Moscow and was a proper hard line Stalinist right till the end. His heroic communist background was his unclear involvement in the mutiny of a French dreadnought in the Black Sea that was supporting the Whites in the Russian Civil War. The mutiny had nothing to do with communist support and everything to do with pay, rations and the crew not being demobilised after WW1. It also wasn't clear how involved Marty actually was, but he ended up being imprisoned by the French government for mutiny so it worked out for him in the end. There is no start to his military talents but he loved to interfere with the operations of the Brigade, this didn't end well in OTL and won't end well in Butterfly.
The International Brigades are about two months late compared to OTL, the Comintern probably don't like being told to shut up and wait but will do it, because Moscow told them to. This will mean more 'leakage' of volunteers to other factions who are getting organised, but with France officially on-side with the Republicans it will be easier to organise so those two factors net out. Total number of Brigadiers is about OTL and with that they managed 20,000 volunteers active at once (hence ~2 divisions). In OTL the Comintern/Moscow agreed the International Brigades at the same time as Non-Intervention Committee was meeting, so it seemed apt to carry that over with the dates changed.
In a more character driven, or more Soviet, AAR Maxim Litvinov would be worth a chapter or two on his own. Soviet foreign policy was 'Collective Security for much of the 1930s as Litvinov was allowed to freelance policy while Stalin focused on the domestic. This allowed him to run a pro-League of Nations, collaborative and alliance focused foreign policy despite it being the exact opposite of the official Comintern line at the time (which was 'The revolution is imminent, no co-operation with anyone but the revolutionary vanguard, etc). Must have made for some fun meetings. That aside he was the son of a Jewish banking family, one of the organisers of the famous Tbilisi bank raid in 1907, annoyed Stalin several times but still somehow ended up dying of old age.
The Trotskyist 'Lenin Division' is OTL, didn't get quite that many volunteers but with the International Brigades being delayed it is picking up some extra. It did get much more experienced volunteers in OTL, they formed the shock troops of the Lenin Division, if they can get some proper equipment from Catalonia and avoid being purged they will make more of an impact than they did historically.
The CNT-FAI were a bit funny about volunteers in OTL, they wanted people to stay in France and agitate to get Paris to join on the Republican side but felt they had to make an effort to be true to their anarchist values. As France is already on side they've softened a bit TTL, particularly given the losses they are taking, but as with all things related to the anarchists in Spain it would vary between columns.
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