How the International Brigades were ‘thrown into the heart of the fire’

During the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, 35,000 men and women from around the world volunteered to fight against the forces of General Franco and his supporters from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. When the volunteers were withdrawn in September 1938 after two years of bitter fighting, more than a fifth of them had been killed and very few emerged unscathed.

Conflicts are by definition binary affairs, so it’s inevitable that bitterly contrasting views of the role of the International Brigades have existed ever since the civil war itself. For the volunteers and their supporters, their sacrifices were a ‘heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality’. Conversely, Francoist propagandists dismissed them as Red mercenaries, while the predominant role of the International Communist party, the Comintern, led to a long-standing belief that the International Brigades were a ‘Comintern army’, an agent of Stalin’s expansionism and terror.

However, in 1989 the opening up of masses of formerly secret documents held in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) allowed scholars to question some of the more overly simplistic, black-and-white assumptions. The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Tremlett, a journalist based in Spain, is the latest to draw heavily on the material held in Moscow. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s the first study (in English, at least) for nearly 30 years to look at the International Brigades as a whole, rather than the individual national units.

Tremlett deftly interweaves this rich archival material with colourful first-hand accounts from numerous participants. This is no mean feat, given that this ‘Legion of Babel’ came from some 52 countries. The volunteers were divided by nationality, language and by political background; often the only thing they had in common was that they were anti-fascists.